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human discords 






HUMAN DISCORDS 



A 

STUDY IN MEDICAL PSYCHOLOGY 

WITH DESCRIPTIVE CASES 

COLLECTED BY 

F. H. H. 








'Published for "Private Distribution 






' C^ 






Copyrighted, 1892, by 
F. H. HOADLEY, M. D. 



fk A I 



• 



Sir Thomas Browne, in his Religio Medici, says : " It is 
my temper, and I like it the better, to affect all harmony. * * * 
for there is music wherever there is harmony, order or pro- 
portion; and thus far we maintain the music of the spheres ; for 
these well ordered motions and regular paces, though they give 
no sound to the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a 
note most full of harmony. * * * It is the hieroglyphical 
and shadowed lesson of the whole world, and creatures of 
God ; such a melody to the ear, as the whole world well under- 
stood, would afford the understanding." 

Was ich soil? Wer lost mir je die Frage ? 
Was ich kann ? Wer gonnt mir den Versuch ? 
Was ich muss? Vermag' ich's ohne Klage? 
So viel Arbeit fiir ein Leichentuch ! — Platen. 

" It is only with renunciation that life, properly speaking, 
can be said to begin." — Goethe. 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 

The meditations of the philosopher cannot be unin- 
fluenced, nor the heart of the philanthropist unmoved, 
by the facts, which statistics prove, that there are, at the 
present moment, in the United States alone, more than 
106,000 people who are deprived of all their active 
rights as human beings, and made, as far as possible, 
nonentities in the world.* About 52,000 of these are 
actually shut up in lunatic asylums, and of that number 
but very few are ever likely to leave their undesired 
abode, until they take their leave of life itself. It can- 
not therefore be unprofitable to endeavor, in one depart- 
ment of an extensive subject, to follow the course of 
mental degeneration, and by the exhibition of it, to 
justify the world's treatment of the particular discords 
in nature's general harmony. 

It is a well known fact that, from an early period 
of speculative thought, two doctrines have been held 
with regard to the sort of connection which exists 
between a man's mind and his body. 

On the one hand there are those who maintain 
that mind is an outcome and function of matter, in a 
certain state of organization, coming with it, growing 
with it, decaying with it, inseparable from it. On the 
other hand there are those who hold that mind is an 
independent spiritual essence, which has entered into 
the body, as its dwelling place for a time, which makes 
use of it as its mortal instrument, and which will take 

* It must always be borne in mind that under " Insane" the Amer- 
ican Census does not include idiots. If these be added the proportion to 
the population would be raised from about I in 560 to 1 in 300. 



6 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

on its independent life when the body, worn out by the 
operation of natural decay, returns to the earth of which 
it is made. 

Without entering into a discussion as to which is 
the true doctrine, it will be sufficient for our purpose to 
accept and proceed from the generally admitted fact 
that all the manifestations of mind, which we have to do 
with in this world, are connected with organization, de- 
pendent upon it, whether as cause or instrument ; that 
they are never met with apart from it any more than 
electricity, or any other natural force, is met with apart 
from matter, and that higher organization must go 
along with higher mental function. What is the state 
of things in another world — whether the disembodied 
or celestially embodied spirits of the countless myriads 
of the human race that have come and gone through 
countless ages are now living higher lives — I do not 
venture to inquire. One hope and one certitude in 
the matter everyone may be allowed to have and to 
express ; the hope that, if they are living now, it is a 
higher life than they lived upon earth ; the certitude 
that, if they are living a higher life, most of them must 
have had a vast deal to unlearn. 

Many persons, who admit, in general terms, the 
dependence of mental function on cerebral structure, are 
inclined, when brought to the particular test, to make 
an exception in favor of moral feeling, or conscience. 
Some popular capital has been made and made in 
quarters, where we might justly have looked for greater 
sincerity and sounder apprehension, out of the fact that 
physiology, however far it may advance, can never 
bridge over the gap between nerve element and mind, 
can never leap from the movements of molecules to 









HUMAN DISCORDS. 



consciousness. No one has ever said that it could. 
The problem before us as scientific observers is not 
to demonstrate the real nature of the force which we 
designate as mental, nor to show how and why certain 
molecular movements in nerve become, if they do 
become, sensation or idea, but it is to trace here, as in 
other departments of nature, uniformities of sequence, 
to point out that certain sequences are, within our expe- 
rience, the invariable consequences of certain antecedent 
conditions. The how or the why is a mystery which we 
do not attempt to explain ; we do not even aspire to 
know it. What is the actual power, which makes one 
body attract another directly as the mass, and inversely 
as the square of the distance, we have not the least 
knowledge ; why and how certain molecular movements 
become heat, light, electricity, or chemical action, we 
are just as ignorant ; in offering no explanation of the 
why certain states of matter occasion certain states of 
mind, we acknowledge a mystery neither more nor less 
in the one case than in the other. To say that it is 
inconceivable that matter, in however complicated a 
state of organization, should feel and think, is simply 
to appeal to the self sufficiency of the human intellect 
at the present day, and a sort of argument which, if 
logically carried through would bar any new conception 
of what, through ignorance, is yet inconceivable to us. 
It would make the present limit of conception the 
limit of conception forever ; and it is certainly unwar- 
rantable in the face of the fact that the history of the 
progress of knowledge is, in great part, the history of 
the inconceivable becoming conceivable. 

There are still many who are content to rest in the 
same uncertain position which satisfied the well known 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 



author of "Inquiries concerning the Intellectual 
Powers;" who, having pointed out plainly the depend- 
ence of mental function on organization, and, as a 
matter of fact which cannot be denied, that there are 
individuals in whom every correct feeling in regard to 
moral relations is obliterated, while the judgment is 
unimpaired in all other relations, stopped there without 
attempting to prosecute inquiry into the cause of the 
remarkable fact which he justly emphasized; and he said, 
it is "a point in the moral constitution of man which 
does not belong to the physician to investigate ; the fact 
is unquestionable ; the solution is to be sought in the 
records of eternal truth."* 

So far from assenting to such an exclusion the 
physician holds that there is no Holy of Holies in 
science; he asserts that it distinctly belongs to him to 
seek for the solution of the problem in the discovery of 
those laws of nature which are to him the incontestable 
records of eternal truth. 

Whether there is the same essential connection 
between moral sense and brain, or between any of our 
special senses and its special ganglionic center in the 
brain, whether, in short, conscience is a function of 
organization, is a problem which the medical psycholo- 
gist, whose duty brings him into constant intercourse 
with facts, must face; he cannot rest satisfied with vague 
speculation; he is bound to investigate the phenomena 
as they present themselves to observation, and to form 
conclusions from them, without regard to accepted 
theories of faith or knowledge ; if he arrives at sound 
conclusions, from such observations of facts not before 
observed, these will not contradict old faiths unless in 

* Abercrombie, On the Intellectual Powers. 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 



that wherein old faiths are wrong and it is right they 
should be contradicted. His generalizations, like the 
generalizations of astronomy, or chemistry, or any other 
branch of science, must rest on their own merits ; they 
cannot justly be tested by any preconceived standard of 
truth, however much hallowed by antiquity or sanc- 
tioned by authority. 

So far as the phenomena of deranged mind reach, 
the battle has been won and the victory is complete. 
No one, whose opinion is of any value, pretends now 
that they are anything more than the deranged func- 
tions of the supreme nerve centers of the body ; but 
the victory is not yet complete along the whole line 
of mental function. There is the strongest desire 
evinced, and the most strenuous efforts are made in 
many quarters to exempt from physical research the 
highest functions of mind, and particularly the so-called 
moral sense and the will. The moral sense is the 
stronghold of those who have made strategical move- 
ments of retreat from other defensive positions they 
have taken up ; and it is from this stronghold that 
what are deemed the most telling arguments against 
the Darwinian doctrine of physiological evolution have 
come. 

The observation which makes plain the fact "that 
this power should so lose its sway while reason remains 
unimpaired " * does not, however, leave us entirely 
without information concerning the cause of it, when we 
pursue it faithfully, since it reveals as distinct a de- 
pendence of moral faculty upon organization as of any 
other faculty. 

What is commonly called unconsciousness, or insen- 

* Abercrombie, On the Intellectual Powers. 



IO HUMAN DISCORDS. 

sibility, is of course one of the most invariable and char- 
acteristic of the immediate consequences of all serious 
injuries of the brain. This state is as a general rule 
of comparative brief duration, and eventuates either 
in restoration of consciousness or in its obliteration in 
death. Sometimes the unconsciousness arising - out of 
injury to the brain is rapid and complete ; in the course 
of a few minutes the mind is again operating as if 
nothing had happened. Sometimes recovery is tardy, 
unconsciousness being maintained for hours, or days, 
and being gradually replaced by unimpaired mental 
activity. Rarely the restoration to consciousness is in- 
definitely postponed, a state resembling deep slumber 
being continued for weeks or even months or years. 
Many instructive examples of the pervading mental 
effects of physical injury of the brain are to be found 
in medical literature and might be quoted, but a few, 
well authenticated, will suffice. 

In October, 1842, an American medical man, Dr. 
P. R. Hoy, was called to see a youth, aged eighteen, a 
resident of New Haven, Ohio, who had been struck 
down insensible by the kick of a horse. There was a 
depressed fracture of the skull a little above the left 
temple. The skull was trephined and the loose 
fragments of bone that pressed upon the brain were 
removed, whereupon the patient came to his senses. 
On the morning of the third day the patient was again 
unconscious. The wound was opened and a clot of 
blood together with a small quantity of serum was per- 
mitted to escape ; as soon as this cause of pressure was 
removed the boy became not only conscious but was 
able to converse freely. The dura was uninjured and 
the doctor thought it a good opportunity to make an 



HUMAN DISCORDS. II 

experiment. He asked the boy a question which in- 
volved a considerable degree of mental effort and ob- 
served that there was immediately a decided increase 
in the flow of blood in the small vessels of the brain 
accompanied by an increased motion of the organ, and 
that the congestion and motion subsided gradually as 
soon as the mind came to rest. He next asked the 
boy a question, and, before there was time to answer 
it, he pressed firmly with his finger upon the exposed 
brain. As long as the pressure was kept up the boy 
was mute, but the instant it was removed he made a 
reply never suspecting that he had not answered at 
once. This experiment was repeated several times 
with precisely the same result, the boy's thoughts being 
stopped and started again, on each occasion, as easily 
and as certainly as the engineer stops and starts his 
locomotive. 

In August, 1856, an English groom, aged 19, 
working in Mount Pleasant, Racine County, Wiscon- 
sin, was ordered to take the mare, Dolly, to town and 
leave her colt in the stable. While struggling with the 
colt the mare kicked the boy on the head. Those who 
witnessed the accident believed him to be killed, but, 
seeing that he soon began to breath, sent for a surgeon, 
Dr. Hoy, who found a fracture with depression at the 
upper part of the boy's forehead a little to the left of the 
median line. As soon as the depressed portion of the 
bone was removed the patient called out, with great en- 
ergy, " Whoa, Dolly! " and then stared about him in 
blank amazement, demanding, "Where is the mare? 
Where am I, what has happened?" Three hours had 
passed since the accident during which the words 
which he was just going to utter, when it happened, had 



12 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

remained locked up, as they might have been locked up 
in a phonograph, to be let go the moment the obstruct- 
ing pressure was removed. The patient did not remem- 
ber when he came to himself that the mare had kicked 
him ; the last thing, before he was insensible, that he did 
remember was that she wheeled her heels round and laid 
back her ears viciously.* 

I am indebted also to Dr. Hoy for the following re- 
markable case related by Prof. R. D. Mussy, of the Ohio 
Medical School, at Cincinnati, to the class of 1840, in 
a lecture on the physiology of the brain. A man living 
in Vermont was standing near his mill, bantering with 
his son about shooting a kingfisher that was perched on 
a dry snag which projected from the water of the pond. 
The son fired, and the rifle ball, a small one, missed the 
bird, ricochetted and struck his father near the middle 
of the forehead. The man dropped instantly ; he was 
carried home, and, despite the hopelessness of his recov- 
ery, he continued to live on, "a mere animal," incapable 
of speech, for fifteen years ; about this time a slight ele- 
vation of the skull at the crown of the head was discov- 
ered. Dr. Mussy, who related the case, trephined the 
skull at this point ; he found and removed the flattened 
bullet that had remained so long a time within the skull. 
Presently the patient called out, " Zeke, you dog, you 
missed it ! " " Missed what ?" asked the doctor. " Why, 
the kingfisher." This was the first word spoken since 
the accident, and the old man could not understand that 
the report of the rifle was not reverberating, at that mo- 
ment, across the water of the pond. 

A lady, whose case is given by Dr. Abercrombie, 
was seized by an apoplectic attack while engaged at 

* Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, April, 1877. 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 13 

cards. The seizure took place on Thursday evening ; 
she was in a state of stupor during Friday and Saturday, 
and recovered her consciousness rather suddenly on Sun- 
day. The first words she then uttered were, " What is 
trump ?" 

It is told of a British Captain that at the battle of 
the Nile he was giving an order from the quarter deck 
of his vessel when a shot struck him on the head depriv- 
ing him immediately of speech. As he survived the in- 
jury he was taken home, and remained insensible in 
Greenwich Hospital for fifteen months. At the end of 
that period, during which he is said to have manifested 
no sign of intelligence, an operation was performed on 
his head, which almost instantly restored him to con- 
sciousness. He then immediately arose from his bed 
and, not recognizing where he was, or what had oc- 
curred, expressed a desire to complete the order which 
had been abruptly interrupted when he received the in- 
jury fifteen months before.* 

A sailor who was wounded in the head while taking 
a prize in the Mediterranean in June, 1799, lived, to use 
the words of Sir Astley Cooper, " a year unconscious of 
his existence." Mr. Cline, the surgeon, performed on 
him the operation of trepanning a year after the injury. 
The portion of bone which had been driven in was re- 
moved and thus the patient recovered perfectly in a few 
days the use of his brain and mental faculties.f 

Cases of this kind show how entirely dependent 
every function of mind is upon a sound mechanism of 
the brain. Just as we can by pressing upon the sensory 
nerve of the arm prevent an impression made upon the 

* West Riding Reports, 1872. Vol. II, p. 118. 
f West Riding Reports, 1872. Vol. II. p. 117. 



14 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

finger being carried to the brain and felt there, so by 
pressing upon the brain we can as certainly stop a 
thought or a volition. In all these cases a good recov- 
ery presently followed the removal of the pressure upon 
the brain ; but it would be of no little medical interest 
to have the after histories of the persons, since it hap- 
pens sometimes after a serious injury to the head, that 
despite an immediate recovery, slow degenerative 
changes are set up in the brain, months or years after- 
wards, which go on to cause a gradual weakening, and 
perhaps eventual destruction of mind. 

Now the instructive matter in these cases is that the 
moral character is usually impaired first and sometimes 
is completely perverted without a corresponding deteri- 
oration of the understanding; the person is a thoroughly 
changed character for the worse. The injury has pro- 
duced disorder in the most delicate part of the mental 
organization, that which is separated from actual contact 
with the skull only by the thin investing membranes of 
the brain ; and once damaged it is seldom that it is ever 
completely restored to its former state of soundness. 
However, happy recoveries are now and then made 
from mental derangement caused by physical injury to 
the brain. 

A joiner, who had led a steady life, while at work, 
and in his usual health, was struck on his head by a ham- 
mer that fell from a height of about six feet. He was 
not unsensed, nor did any serious symptoms show them- 
selves at the time of the accident ; but afterwards he felt 
the effects of the blow. In six months time he began to 
complain of giddiness ; he gradually lost his power of 
application and concentration ; he tried to work but had 
no idea of what he had to do, and could not fix his mind 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 15 

on anything. In the course of a twelve month his symp- 
toms became aggravated ; he grew irritable, morose, 
violent, and threatened suicide ; he was taken to a hos- 
pital where he made a most determined attempt on his 
life, by throwing himself over from the staircase at the 
top of the hospital. His life was saved by the courage 
of one of the nurses, Miss Stockburn, a probationer ; 
next day, nineteen months after he received the injury, 
he was taken to an asylum. There was a slight depres- 
sion at the seat of the injury on the left parietal ; a por- 
tion of the skull was removed by the trephine ; no 
fracture was found and the membranes beneath were 
apparently healthy. The wound healed rapidly and 
well ; a decided improvement in nervons symptoms fol- 
lowed. One month after the operation he was lively, 
and cheerful, and went to work in the carpenter shop. 
Dr. Bacon, Medical Superintendent of the asylum says : 
" He steadily improved and was discharged on trial six 
months after his admission to the asylum ; he went 
back to his old employers, is still at work, and is re- 
ported to be entirely well and fit to be at large."* 

A machinist, while working in a foundry, was struck 
on the top of the head by a stove lifter. He was 
taken home unconscious and so remained for six hours 
and confined to his bed for several days. He was soon 
able to resume his work which he continued to do for 
six months. From that time on he became negligent 
and careless about his clothing, with lack of interest in 
anything ; finally melancholy and suicidal, and was 
brought to an asylum, three years after the injury. 
There was a slight depression of the skull at the point 
where the blow was received ; the surrounding bone was 

* Journal of Mental Science, Jan'y, 1881. Vol. 26, p. 551. 



l6 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

removed by means of a chisel when a spicule of bone the 
size and shape of a headless carpet tack was found punc- 
turing the dura ; this was removed ; a water dressing was 
applied to the wound which healed promptly by direct 
union. The patient was about on the third day and 
went home on the seventh day "a new man," as he ex- 
pressed it, and has been able to continue his work as a 
stove moulder from that time. Dr. Fletcher, Superin- 
tendent of the Indiana State Hospital for the Insane, 
who reported the case, says : " It is now two years since 
the man was discharged ; he has been perfectly well and 
has worked at his trade constantly."* 

A particularly instructive case was reported by 
Dr. Holland Skae, Medical Superintendent of the Ayr 
District Asylum : 

Some years ago a young man, no member of his 
family known to have been insane before, while work- 
ing in a coal pit, was felled to the ground by a large 
mass of falling coal, which struck him on the head a 
little above the left extremity of the left eyelid, 
causing fracture of the skull at that point. He lay 
insensible for four days after the accident, when he 
gradually recovered consciousness, and a few weeks 
afterwards resumed work in the pit. Not many weeks 
after doing so, however, his wife and friends began to 
observe an alteration in his habits and nature which 
became more and more marked and obtrusive as time 
progressed. He had formerly been a very cheerful, 
rather merry, sociable, and good-natured man — what 
his fellow-workers would have called a " neighbourly 
chiel " — and at all times previous to the accident was 
kind and lovable to his wife and children, with whom 

* American Journal of Insanity, October, 1887, Vol. 44, p. 212. 



HUMAN DISCORDS 17 

he delighted to pass his evenings in sober enjoyment. 
About this time, however, he began to evince a differ- 
ent spirit and nature altogether ; he became irritable 
and moody ; at work he would separate himself from 
his fellow-workers, and when spoken to by them would 
barely return a civil answer ; at home, of course, the 
change was still more striking. He was cross and 
would sit moping over the fire all the evening ; he 
rudely repulsed his wife's affectionate efforts to rouse 
him out of his unhappy humor, and "shut her up " with 
some snappish expression. When his children ran to 
meet him, he would push them impatiently aside ; 
altogether his conduct was bearish, disappointing and 
ill-natured. During four years matters got worse and 
worse ; he often got excited, using violent language to 
his wife, his children, and the neighbors. Eventually 
he became maniacal ; attempted to kill his wife ; as- 
saulted every one who approached him ; and even at- 
tempted suicide. He then had a succession of epileptic 
fits and was taken to an asylum. Here he was taciturn, 
morose and ill-natured ; he was averse to doing any- 
thing at all, either in the way of work, or joining in 
amusements. He was suspicious of those about him ; 
moreover, he had a fixed delusion that he was the 
victim of a conspiracy, on the part of his wife and 
friends, to deprive him of his liberty and independence ; 
and expressed himself in bitter and resentful terms. 
A depression of the skull was distinctly traceable both 
by the eye and by the finger at the point where he 
sustained the blow. He underwent the operation of 
trephining, and the depressed portion of bone was re- 
moved. After a week or two in bed he was moving 
about, and a gradual improvement took place. He 



l8 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

very soon became a very different person altogether ; 
all his old affection for his wife revived in full force. 
He became a cheerful, active, lively fellow, never sat- 
isfied if he was not doing something. He made friends 
with the attendants and amongst the patients ; and not 
very long after he was trephined he was discharged 
sane. He has ever since supported his wife and family. 
Dr. Skae says : " He has regularly paid visits at about 
six months intervals to the asylum, generally passing the 
whole day at it. I have seen him on each occasion, 
and am satisfied by careful inquiry that he has con- 
tinued perfectly sane since his discharge four years 
ago."* 

No plainer example, surely, could be wished to 
show the direct connection of cause and effect, the 
great deterioration of moral character produced by the 
physical injury of the supreme nerve centers of the 
brain. When the cause was taken away the effect 
went also. 

In the morbid conditions of double consciousness 
there is something positive as well as negative; in both 
these states the vital forces are operating continuously 
and both have therefore a conviction of continuous 
existence. In one the identity is laid aside with all the 
remembrances connected with it, but another is put on, 
and with the new identity a new memory acts in concert. 

A well marked illustration of this is to be found 
in some cases published by the late Professor Silliman, 
of Yale College, in the American Journal of Science, 
and reproduced in the "Cyclopaedia of Practical Medi- 
cine," Vol. IV., pp. 27, 28, of which a brief abstract 
is here given. 

* Journal of Mental Science, January, 1874, Vol. 19, p. 552. 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 19 

Case i. A lady in New England, of respectable 
family, became subject to paroxysms of delirium, which 
came on suddenly, and after continuing an indefinite 
time, went off as suddenly, leaving her mind perfectly 
rational. It often happened that when she was engaged 
in conversation, she would stop short in the midst of it, 
become in a moment delirious, and commence a conver- 
sation on some other subject not having the remotest 
connection with the previous one; nor would she advert 
to that during her delirium. "When she became natural 
again she would pursue the same conversation in which 
she had been engaged during the lucid interval, begin- 
ing where she left off. To such a degree was this 
carried, that she would complete an unfinished story or 
sentence, or even an unfinished word. When the next 
paroxysm came on she would continue the conversation 
which she had been pursuing in her preceding 
paroxysm; so that she appeared as a person might be 
supposed to do who had two souls, each occasionally 
active and occasionally dormant, and utterly ignorant of 
what the other was doing." It is evident that this 
affection was neither delirium in the ordinary accepta- 
tion of terms, nor any form of madness, but one of 
coherent reverie. 

Case 2. An intelligent lady, in the State of 
New York, undertook a piece of fine needlework, to 
which she devoted her time almost constantly for 
many davs. Before its completion she became sudden- 
ly delirious, and she continued in that state for seven 
years. She said not a word during that time about 
her needlework, but, on recovering suddenly from the 
affection, immediately inquired respecting it. 

Case 3. A farmer, in New England, became 



20 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

dejected and melancholy under the impression that he 
had made an unwise sale of his property. He was 
preparing for the enclosure of a lot of land, and began 
with a beetle and wedges to split timber ; at night he 
put his tools into a hollow tree and went home. Here 
he was seized with delirium, which continued several 
years. He suddenly recovered, and the first question 
which he asked was, whether his sons had brought in 
the beetle and wedges? He appeared to be wholly 
unconscious of the lapse of time from the commence- 
ment of his attack. His sons avoided any explanation, 
and simply replied that they had been unable to find 
the tools. He immediately arose from his bed, went 
into the field, where he had been at work a number of 
years before, and found the wedges and the rings of 
the beetle where he had left them, the beetle itself 
having mouldered away. 

The phenomenon of thought alternately inter- 
rupted and restored, or of dipsychia, as we might term 
it in following Professor Silliman's suggestion, though it 
reminds us of the old romantic tales of princes laid to 
sleep in enchanted castles, is nevertheless confirmed by 
sufficient evidence, and may be considered as a well es- 
tablished fact. A notable instance of this description 
has been reported in the 'Transactions of the Royal 
Society of Edinburgh,' Vol. IX, by Dr. Dyce, and is 
cited by Dr. Abercrombie. 

The case related by Dr. Dyce is very curious, and 
in some of its particulars bears resemblance to the his- 
tory of Negretti. 

Going a step further, let me point out that disease 
will sometimes do as plain and positive damage to moral 
character as any which direct injury of the brain will do. 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 21 

A fever has sometimes deranged it as deeply as a blow 
on the head ; a child's conscience has been clean effaced 
by a succession of epileptic convulsions, just as the mem- 
ory is sometimes effaced ; and those who see much of 
epilepsy know well the extreme but passing moral trans- 
formation that occurs in connection with its seizures. 
The person may be as unlike himself as possible when 
he is threatened with a fit ; although naturally cheerful, 
good natured, sociable and obliging, he becomes irrit- 
able, surly, and morose, very suspicious, takes offense 
at the most innocent remark or act, and is apt to resent 
imaginary offenses with great violence. The change 
might be compared well with that which happens when 
a clear and cloudless sky is overcast suddenly with dark 
and threatening thunder clouds ; and just as the darkly 
clouded sky is cleared by the thunderstorm which it por- 
tends, so the gloomy moral perturbation is discharged 
and the mental atmosphere cleared by an epileptic fit or 
a succession of such fits. 

In a few remarkable cases however the patient does 
not come to himself immediately after the fit but is left 
in a peculiar state of quasi-somnambulism, during which 
he acts like an automaton, doing strange, absurd, and 
sometimes even criminal things, without apparently 
knowing at the time what he is doing, and certainly 
without remembering in the least what he has done, 
when he comes to himself. Of excellent moral character 
habitually, he may turn thief in one of these states, or 
perpetrate some other criminal offense, whereby he gets 
himself into trouble with the police. 

The following case is taken from a paper read at 
the Paris International Congress, 1878, by Dr. Eche- 
verria, in which he gave the results of observations on 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 



267 cases of unquestionable Epileptic Insanity forming 
part of 532 carefully observed cases of epilepsy. 

A young man, subject to petit mat, in consequence 
of a fall, one evening after an attack left home, and went 
in a cabriolet, which he found stopping before a house, 
to the grave of his father, a mile and a half from Wash- 
ington, where he gathered flowers to convey to his 
mother, whom he invited to go for a drive. When she 
asked how he had obtained the carriage, he answered 
that he had found it lost in the street. She ordered him 
to place the horse and carriage instantly in a coach- 
house, and seek their owner. Instead of obeying he ap- 
propriated them, and when the proprietor discovered 
them he pursued him as a thief. When before the mag- 
istrate next day, he could give no account or explanation 
of his conduct ; in fact it was obliterated from his mem- 
ory. Some months after when in New York, he left 
home after one of his seizures, and roving about as a 
vagabond on the quays, he met an agent who engaged 
him as a sailor on a vessel about to sail to London. The 
agreement was duly executed, and after having left with 
this agent nearly all his money, &c., he embarked. The 
captain was not long in discovering he was no marine, 
and finding him very odd, forbade him to mount the 
masts, and assigned him some light work. Three or 
four days after, the patient awoke out of this state of un- 
consciousness, and expressed the greatest astonishment 
on finding himself on board a vessel, and was unable to 
give any account of what had occurred. The mother 
discovered through the police the departure of her son, 
and took the measures necessary to place him in an 
asylum. There he had many similar attacks, preceded 
by nocturnal attacks and petit mal, until then unrecog- 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 23 

nized. In the intervals he was very gentle and reason- 
able, but during the attacks he was vicious, always in 
motion, and disposed to be violent. 

Dr. Echeverria has yet to find a true case of epi- 
lepsy without unconsciousness. It is more than patent 
in the stupor which Delasiauve regards as the character- 
istic of the disease. 

We could not overlook the example cited by 
Dejoeghere, in which the motive and the premeditation 
are fitly set forth in a case that on the other hand re- 
mains as a painful record of the punishment of a furious 
madman, not only unjust, but unmerciful in its inflic- 
tion : — 

Roegiers, aged 30, of strong constitution, was the 
son of healthy parents. When seven years old he was 
seized, upon a sudden fright, with an epileptic fit, soon 
followed by several others, chiefly nocturnal, increasing 
every time in intensity and duration, until lastly degen- 
erating into a true rage. Roegiers had a fight with a 

man named B . Judged by the Court of Courtrai 

he was condemned to a few months imprisonment ; he 
protested his innocence as to the charge brought against 
him ; furthermore, on leaving the Court he shook hands 

with B , assuring him that he entertained no grudge 

against him, since he could not be held accountable for 
the wrong decision of the Court. However, it is this 

very man B whom he afterwards intends to kill, and 

to this effect Roegiers was seen on the day of the mur- 
der steadily sharpening his knife for several hours on a 
grindstone, and repeating incessantly : " I shall know how 
to have you." He then goes out in broad daylight, 

holding his knife, runs to B , who lives in a very 

populous quarter, and boldly enters his house. But 



24 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

B , on beholding Roegiers coming with a knife, 

escapes through the back door. Roegiers chases him, 

stabs B 's sister, who endeavored to defend him, and, 

finally, overtakes him and rushes upon his victim like a 
tiger. He inflicts upon him a deep wound in the neck, 
and plunges his nails in it to tear it asunder. 

A great crowd hastened to the spot, but the most 
daring were afraid of going to the rescue of the unfortu- 
nate B . It was not until Roegiers fell down that 

they took hold of him, and bound him with cords to a 
wheelbarrow. To every question put to any detail con- 
cerning his horrible crime, Roegiers gave always this 
answer : " Since you make me aware of it, sir, I must 
needs believe it, but I completely ignore it." 

The physician who examined on the mental condi- 
tion of Roegiers declared that he enjoyed full possession 
of his reason. Roegiers was condemned to death, but 
the sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life, 
and the exposing for one hour. While suffering this last 
punishment he was seized with such violent convulsions 
that the executioner was obliged to place him in a chair 
where he had the greatest difficulty to secure him.* 

This determination beyond recall of the Court of 
Courtrai to carry out its sentence to the end has a fitting 
parallel in Massachusetts. 

The case happened in Boston, the Metropolis of 
New England, about twenty years ago, and the victim 
of such cold execution of the law was again a wretched 
young epileptic, subject to diurnal and nocturnal fits ; 
during the latter he would go up the roof of his house, 
dance in the most dangerous positions, and accomplish 

* " Annales de Medicine" Beiges, 1843. Quoted in " La Folie Devant 
les Tribunaux " par Legrand du Saulle, Paris, 1864, p. 422. 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 25 

unconsciously such other no less risky feats, which caused 
his neighbors to call them "dare-devilment." One even- 
ing this lad, under the influence of a fit, ran after his 
sweetheart into the street and took her life with a bread 
knife he carried home, and of which crime he always 
protested to have no recollection whatever. Dr. Clement 
A. Walker, Superintendent of the Lunatic Hospital, 
Boston, endeavored, unsuccessfully, to satisfy the jury 
that the boy was an epileptic ; that the homicidal act of 
violence had been the outcome of epileptic insanity ; 
that epileptics cannot be held responsible for any act of 
violence perpetrated during their unconscious automat- 
ism which they have no power to control, nor capacity 
to judge. Consequently he was convicted of man- 
slaughter and sentenced to prison ; but while the judge 
was uttering the sentence, the boy fell into a violent fit, so 
violent that several officers — and he was a lad not much 
over fourteen — failed to control him. A physician was 
sent for who etherized him, and he was taken back to 
jail. This physician testified that he thought the fit was 
feigned, and did not see any good evidence why it was 
not. About one week after, the prisoner was called for 
sentence again, when he was brought in by one door, 
walked through the Court, and taken out by another 
door. It was ordered by the Court that the prisoner 
should be sentenced while thus walking through, lest he 
might be seized with another fit, which exploded twenty- 
four hours after confinement in prison. 

In this singular case, it became a question whether 
the execution of the law should be carried out in spite of 
everything, cheating, as it was, the epileptic malady from 
its attacks, by the strategy of walking the boy across the 
Court while sentence was pronounced, in utter disregard 



26 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

of the statutory provision by which the prisoner must 
stand before the judge and jury to hear his sentence, as 
well as of every humane sentiment of commiseration, to 
which the violent convulsions experienced by the boy in 
Court so strongly appealed, and which the judge did 
not believe to have been simulated, as was demonstrated 
by the unprecedented and illegal proceeding he author- 
ized in order to prevent a recurrence of a fit. 

Dr. David Skae describes the case of a gentleman, 
afflicted with epilepsy, who came voluntarily under his 
care, whose violence was most sudden and impulsive, 
followed by maniacal paroxysm and fury ; "for eight or 
ten days he spun round and round from left to right — 
sometimes lying, sometimes sitting, sometimes on his 
head/' While chatting pleasantly over a rubber of whist, 
he would suddenly perform a somersault over the table, 
upsetting everything, and, unless forcibly restrained by 
two or three strong men, assault everybody right and 
left. 

Cases of injury to moral character from sun-stroke 
are very like those already described. A young officer 
in the Indian army became insane from sun-stroke and 
continually complained of his fellow officers poisoning 
his food. To avoid this annoyance they persuaded him 
to sell out. He took his passage from Calcutta for Eng- 
land, but the passengers seeing his insanity, refused to 
travel with him, and the captain landed him at Madras, 
giving him back half his passage money. After waiting 
some time he got a passage by a sailing vessel to Eng- 
land, and on his way home he felled the mate of the 
vessel with a large mallet ; he was put in irons and on 
his arrival was handed over to the authorities to be 
tried, being in the meanwhile put in Newgate. On the 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 27 

interposition of his relatives he was released and placed 
in an asylum. He was generally morose, but joined in 
the amusements of the other patients, playing cricket, 
billiards, bowles, and taking long walks, but he never 
lost sight of the necessity laid upon him to kill some- 
body. 

He left the asylum and has boarded in various 
houses in the country, under the charge of an attendant, 
upon whom he has made some murderous assaults.* 

The " Neurological Correspondence" of The Jour- 
nal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, January, 1878, 
Vol. Ill, No. 1, contains several interesting notes. Dr. 
Edward C. Mann read a paper before the Medico-Legal 
Society of New York, in which he relates the case of 
a man who had been suffering from sun-stroke, and 
who took a small quantity of alcohol and then went 
out for a walk. He met a friend with whom he had 
been familiar for years, and a discussion arose as to 
the respective merits of certain politicians, when the 
argument becoming excited, the man pulled out a re- 
volver and shot his friend. He then went in a con- 
fused and dazed state and sat for some hours on a pier 
near the river ; subsequently he went home, burst into 
tears, and, after informing his wife of the sad occur- 
rence, gave himself up at the police station. There 
was a total blank in the prisoner's mind in regard to 
the events immediately preceding the pistol shot, which 
seemed to have aroused his attention at the time, and 
he had no recollection of the fact that he had sat on 
the pier for some time afterwards. There had existed 
for months previous to the occurrence a profound 

* Morisonian Lectures on Insanity for 1873, Edited by T. S. Clous 
ton, M. D. 



28 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

moral or affective derangement, which from its marked 
periodicity was evidently epileptiform in character, and 
the sudden homicidal outburst supplied the interpreta- 
tion of the previously obscure attacks of recurrent 
derangement. There had evidently been induced, by 
sun-stroke, an epileptiform neurosis which had been 
manifesting itself for months, chiefly by irritability, 
suspicion, moroseness, and perversion of character, with 
periodic exacerbations of excitement, all foreign to the 
man previous to the attack of sun-stroke. This epi- 
leptic neurosis often exists for a long time in an un- 
developed or masked form, and is connected with 
suicidal and homicidal mania. There is abundant tes- 
timony to show that during such seizures persons may 
perform actions and even speak and answer questions 
automatically. Moreover, such persons may entertain 
delusions of fear and persecutions, and commit criminal 
deeds as a result of such delusions ; and when such 
cases in their terror and distress of mind commit such 
violent deeds they either experience immediate relief 
or they continue in a state of excitement unconscious 
or very imperfectly conscious of the gravity of their 
acts. When they become conscious again, their 
memory is apt to be very uncertain as to the preced- 
ing events. 

Intense cold, it is well known, will affect the men- 
tal faculties in a remarkable manner, when the corporeal 
functions have comparatively suffered less. 

Captain Parry relates, that during his voyage of 
discovery, two young gentlemen, when first they re- 
turned on board ship after exposure to intense cold, 
looked wild, spoke thick and indistinctly, and it was 
impossible to draw from them a rational answer ; the 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 29 

mental powers appeared gradually to revive with the 
returning circulation ; till then they had the appear- 
ance as if they had been drinking too freely.* 

Dr. Reich tells us of four boys, from six to ten 
years of age, who were exposed in a sledge to cold 
of from sixteen to twenty-two degrees below zero ; 
and, being suddenly introduced into a room heated by 
a stove, they showed symptoms of mental derangement, 
lasting for several hours. There were maniacal excite- 
ment, delirium, and halucinations. This condition 
passed off with a long sleep, and on awakening they 
retained no recollection whatever of the mental dis- 
order. It is supposed to have been caused by an 
alteration in the cerebral circulation induced by the 
rapid change from cold to heat.f 

The paroxysms of epilepsy are often preceded by 
a spectrum; and the state of the brain then existing, 
whatever it may be, being present in other instances 
without being followed by the paroxysm, has often 
been the origin of a belief in supernatural appearances. 

Dr. Conolly mentions the case of a gentleman of 
his acquaintance who in a state approaching to faint- 
ness, sometimes induced by cupping, and sometimes 
by pain, sees the most lovely landscapes displayed 
before him. J The same writer records a case in which 
an attack of scarlet fever threw all the previous events 
of a boy's life so much into the shade that they 
could not be distinctly remembered for many years 
afterwards ; they were not forgotten, but they were 
dimly recollected. | 

*" Expedition to the North Pole." Vol. I, p. 108. 
t " Centralblatt fiir Nervenheilkunde." No. 6, 1881. 
X Op. Cit., p. 240. 
J Op. Cit., p. 236. 



30 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

One effect of the great plague at Athens is related 
to have been the impairment of the memory of those 
who recovered ; so that their friends were often not 
remembered by them, but were thought to be stran- 
gers. In the fever which has been described by 
certain authors under the name of Calentura, a sin- 
gular delusion of the senses is said to take place. 
This affection has been observed in sailors during 
voyages in hot regions ; the patient mistakes the sea 
for fields and pastures, representing, perhaps, the 
scenery of his distant home ; and the patients have 
been known to walk overboard with this impression. 

In consumption, the most fatal of all diseases, there 
is a state of the brain which prevents much of the suf- 
fering which might be expected to arise from the num- 
erous causes of distress which are accumulated in the 
patient. An immitigable cough, preventing sleep ; a 
burning fever ; fits of coldness ; profuse and wasting 
perspiration ; diarrhoea ; frequent sickness ; daily in- 
creasing emaciation ; falling hair ; and strength almost 
hourly diminishing ; — all these lamentable accompani- 
ments or parts of the malady, weigh little on the 
spirits of the patient, and hopes are entertained, and pro- 
jects formed, even in the hour of death. Even physi- 
cians, to whom all these signs are so familiar as hardly 
to be mistaken or overlooked, seem to overlook or 
mistake them in their own persons. M. Bayle, in his 
excellent work on diseases of the brain, ascribes this 
effect, which he says he has remarked in three physicians 
who had died of the malady, to cerebral excitement. 

Phthisis being one of the very few organic diseases 
which often appear in early life, it generally happens 
that its victims have death set before them before life 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 31 

has lost any of its charm, and whilst every object of 
human ambition appears in those colors of which time 
seldom fails to deprive them. But they do not see the 
death that is set before them ; and commonly sink into 
the grave with hope and promised pleasures still around 
them. 

If we had not hourly proofs of our entire depend- 
ence on a Governing Power, it might be worth while to 
remark on the possibility shown to us in the curious in- 
stances where the delusion is complete, of our being 
so variously affected by the same external circum- 
stances as to make our perfect happiness, if it were de- 
signed that it should be perfect here, quite consistent 
with the accidents of terrestrial life. No extravagance 
of imagination is required to admit that the slightest 
possible change of the mode in which our organization 
is affected by external agents, might create that happier 
state to which men look forward amidst the trials of this, 
but which will probably consist of no less a change of 
objects than of modes of perceiving them. 

There are other diseases which in like manner play 
havoc with moral feeling. Almost every form of men- 
tal derangement begins with a moral alienation, slight 
perhaps at the outset, but soon so great that a prudent, 
temperate, chaste, and truthful person shall be changed 
to exactly the opposite of what he was. 

This alienation of character continues throughout 
the course of the disease, and it is frequently found to 
last for a while after all disorder of intelligence is gone. 
Indeed the experienced physician never feels confident 
that the recovery is stable and sure until the person is 
restored to his natural sentiments and affections. Thus 
it appears that when the mind undergoes decadence, the 



32 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

moral feeling is the first to suffer ; the highest aquisition 
of mental evolution, it is the first to witness to mental 
degeneracy. 

One form of mental disease, known as general par- 
alysis, is usually accompanied with a singularly complete 
paralysis of the moral sense from the outset, and a not 
uncommon feature of it, very striking in some cases, is 
a persistent tendency to steal, the person stealing, in a 
weak minded manner, what he has no particular need of, 
and makes no use of when he has stolen it. The victim 
of this fatal disease is frequently sent to prison and 
treated as a common criminal, notwithstanding a med- 
ical man who knows his business might be able to say 
with entire certitude that the supposed criminal was 
suffering from organic disease of the brain, which had 
destroyed moral sense at the outset, which would go on 
to destroy all the other faculties of his mind in succession, 
and which in the end would destroy life itself. There is 
no question in such case of moral guilt ; it is not sin, 
but disease that we are confronted with ; not a theory, 
but a condition ; and after the victim's death we find the 
plainest evidence of disease of the brain, which has gone 
along with the decay of mind. 

It can hardly be necessary to remind the reader of 
the fate of some eminent public characters, men moving 
in stations of great responsibility, and harassed with the 
cares of State ; or men engaged in extensive commer- 
cial transactions ; or men of studious habits and much 
ambition, and anxious minds. Many instances might 
be mentioned of the fatal end of such persons appar- 
ently induced, and in some cases proved to be induced, 
by slow disease of the brain, or the membranes 
of the brain, commencing and going on unsus- 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 33 

pected until it became inconsistent with the perform- 
ance of the proper functions of life ; or, until the 
long course of self-restraint which has acquired the re. 
spect of his fellow creatures suddenly ceases and a man 
of high character is reduced to infamy ; or, until produc- 
ing extreme irritability or melancholy, it causes the in- 
dividual to die by his own hand. Where no previous 
misconduct can be traced, it is more charitable and 
generally more just to attribute the misdeed to mental 
disturbance arising from positive physical disease. 

I need not dwell any longer upon the morality- 
sapping effects of particular diseases, but shall simply 
call to mind the profound deterioration of moral sense 
and will, which is produced by the long-continued and 
excessive use of alcohol and opium. There is nowhere 
a more miserable specimen of degradation of moral 
feeling, and of impotence of will, than the debauchee 
who has made himself the abject slave of either of 
these pernicious excesses. Insensible to the interests 
of his family, to his personal reponsibilities, to the obli- 
gations of duty, he is utterly untruthful and untrust- 
worthy, and in the worst end there is not a meanness of 
pretense, or of conduct, that he will not descend to, not 
a He he will not tell, in order to gain the means to 
gratify his overruling craving. 

It is not merely that passion is strengthened and 
will weakened by indulgence, as a moral effect, but the 
alcohol or opium, which is absorbed into his blood, is 
carried by it to his brain and acts injuriously upon its 
tissues ; the chemist will, indeed, extract alcohol from 
the besotted brain of the worst drunkard, as he will de- 
tect morphia in the secretions of a person who is taking 
large doses of morphia. Seldom, therefore, is it of the 



34 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

least use to preach reformation to these people until 
they have been restrained forcibly from their besetting 
indulgence for a long enough period to allow the brain 
to get rid of the poison, and its tissues to regain a 
healthier tone. Too often, it is of little use then ; the 
tissues have been damaged beyond the possibility of 
complete restoration. Moreover, observation has shown 
that the drink craving is oftentimes hereditary, so that 
a taste for the poison is ingrained in the tissues, and is 
quickly kindled by gratification into uncontrollable de- 
sire. 

Thus far it appears, then, that moral feeling may 
be impaired or destroyed by direct injury of the brain, 
by the disorganizing action of disease, and by the 
chemical action of certain substances, which, when 
taken in excess, are poisons to the nervous system. 

When we look sincerely at the facts, we cannot 
help perceiving that it is just as closely dependent upon 
organization as the meanest function of mind ; that 
there is not an argument to prove the so-called materi- 
alism of one part of the mind which does not apply with 
equal force to the whole mind. 

Seeing that we know no more essentially what mat- 
ter is than what mind is, being unable in either case to 
go beyond the phenomena of which we have experi- 
ence, it might be of interest to ask those who cannot 
conceive that any organization of matter however com- 
plex should be capable of such exalted functions as 
those which are called mental, whether it is really any 
more conceivable that any organization of matter can 
be the mechanical instrument of the complex mani- 
festations of an immaterial mind. Is it not just as 
easy for an omnipotent power to endow matter with 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 35 

mental functions as it is to create an immaterial entity 
capable of accomplishing them through matter?* 

From the time of Locke, the discussions" of phil- 
osophers have tended to unsettle our notions of mat- 
ter, and no one is hardy enough, now, to say what it is 
or what it may not be. It is strangely overlooked by 
many who write on this matter, that the brain is not a 
dead instrument, but a living organ, with functions of a 
higher kind than those of any other bodily organ, in- 
asmuch as its organic nature and structure far surpasses 
those of any other organ. What, then, are these func- 
tions if not mental ? No one thinks it necessary to as- 
sume an immaterial liver behind the hepatic structure in 
order to account for its functions. But so far as the na- 
ture of nerve and the complex structure of the cerebral 
convolutions exceed in dignity the hepatic elements and 
structure, so far must the material functions of the brain 
exceed those of the liver. Men are not sufficiently care- 
ful to ponder the wonderful operations of which matter 
is capable, or to reflect on the miracles effected by it 
which are continually before their eyes. Are the prop- 
erties of a chemical compound less mysterious because 
of the familiarity with which we handle them? Con- 
sider the seed dropped into the ground ; it swells with 
germinating energy ; bursts its integuments, sends up- 
ward a delicate shoot, which grows into a stem, putting 
forth in due season its leaves and flowers, until finally a 
beautiful structure is formed such as Solomon in all his 
glory could not equal, and all the art of mankind can- 
not imitate. And yet all these processes are operations 
of matter ; for it is not thought necessary to assume an 

*See "Treatise on Christian Doctrine," by John Milton, Vol. 1 pp 
250, 251. ' ^" 



36 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

immaterial, or spiritual plant which effects its purposes 
through the agency of the material structure which we 
observe.* Surely there are here exhibited properties of 
matter wonderful enough to satisfy anyone of the 
powers that may be inherent in it. Are we, then, to 
believe that the highest and most complex development 
of organic structure is not capable of even more won- 
derful operations? 

Matter, which seems, to common people, so intelli- 
gible, is still wrapped in mystery. We know it only by 
its relation to mind or as an assemblage of powers to 
awaken certain sensations. 

Leaving this inquiry, however, without attempting 
to explain the mystery of that which constitutes the 
particular nature of matter, on which its properties de- 
pend, I pass on to some considerations of the reciprocal 
relation of mental function to moral feeling as illustrated 
in the development of the human brain. 

It is a pretty well accepted scientific doctrine 
that our far-distant prehistoric ancestors were a very 
much lower order of beings than we are — even if they 
did not inherit directly from the monkey ; that they 
were very much like in conformation, habits, intelli- 
gence, and moral feeling, the lowest existing savages ; f 
and that we have risen to our present level of being by 
a slow process of evolution which has been going on 
gradually through untold generations. Whether or not 
"through the ages one increasing purpose runs," it is cer- 
tainly true that "the thoughts of men are widened with 
the process of the suns." Now, when we examine the 

* See " Paradise Lost," John Milton, Book V., lines 469-485. 
f " Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man." Sir 
John Lubbock, London, 1870. 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 37 

brain of the lowest savage — whom we need not be too 
proud to look upon as our ancestor in the flesh — we find 
it to be considerably smaller than the ordinary brain of 
civilized man ; its convolutions, which are the highest 
nerve centers of mind, are decidedly fewer in number, 
more simple in character, and more systematic in ar- 
rangement. These are marks of inferiority, for in those 
things in which it differs from the ordinary brain of civ- 
ilized man it gets nearer in structure to the still much 
inferior brain of the monkey ; it represents, we may 
say, a stage of development in the long distance which 
has been traversed between the two. A comparison of 
the relative brain weights will give a rude notion of the 
differences ; the brain weight of an average Caucasian 
male is forty-nine ounces ; that of a negro is forty-four 
ounces ; and the brains of the Hottentot, Bushman and 
Australian are, so far as observation goes, of less weight 
than those of Negroes ; the average weight of the adult 
male brain is ten per cent, greater than that of the 
female, and the weight of the male Negro's brain is less 
than that of the average Caucasian female.* The brain 
of the Bushwoman weighed thirty-one and a half 
ounces ; that of the Hottentot Venus, who was no 
idiot, was a very little larger. f Professor Gratiolet 
carefully figured and described the brain of the Hotten- 
tot Venus ; it presented a striking simplicity and regu- 
lar arrangement of the convolutions of the frontal lobe ; 
an almost perfect symmetry in the two hemispheres 
"such as is never exhibited in the normal brains of the 
Caucasian race," and which involuntarily recalls the 
regularity and symmetry of the cerebral convolutions 

*John Thurman, M.D., "Journal of Mental Science," April, 1866. 
f Prof. John Marshall, Philosophical Transactions, 1865. 



38 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

in the lower animals. The brain was palpably inferior 
to that of a normally developed white woman ; " it 
could be compared only with the brain of a white who is 
idiotic from arrest of cerebral development."* There 
can be no doubt then of a great difference of develop- 
ment between the highest and the lowest existing human 
brain. 

There can be no doubt, furthermore, that the gross 
differences which there are between the size and develop- 
ment of the brain of a low savage, and of an average 
Caucasian, go along with great differences of intellectual 
and moral capacities ; that lower mental function an- 
swers to lower cerebral structure. It is a well known 
fact that many savages cannot count beyond five,f and 
that they have no words in their vocabulary for the 
higher qualities of human nature, such as virtue, justice, 
humanity, and their opposites, vice, injustice, and cru- 
elty, or for the more abstract ideas. The native Aus- 
tralian, for example, who is in the case, having no words 
for justice, love, mercy, and the like, would not in the 
least know what remorse meant ; if anyone showed it 
in his presence, he would think, probably, that he had 
got a bad headache. He has no words to express the 
higher sentiments and thoughts, because he has never 
felt and thought them, and has never, therefore, had 
the need to express them ; J he has not in his inferior 

* Transactions of the Anthropological Society, Paris, 1861. 

f Brett, " History of the British Colonies in the West Indies." 4th ed., 
London, 1887. 

X True love, observes Sir John Lubbock, is almost unknown amongst 
the lowest races, and marriage in its lowest phases is by no means a matter 
of affection and companionship. Among the Koussa Kaffirs, Lichtenstein 
asserts that there is no feeling of love in marriage. In North America the 
Tinne Indians had no word for " dear" or " beloved," and the Algonquin 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 39 

brain the nervous substrata which should minister to 
such sentiments and thoughts, and cannot have them in 
his present state of social evolution, any more than he 
could make a particular movement of his body if the 
proper muscles were wanting. Nor could any amount 
of training in the world, we may be sure, ever make 
him equal in this respect to the average Caucasian, any 
more than it could add substance to the brain of a small- 
headed idiot and raise it to the ordinary level. Were 
anyone, indeed, to make the experiment of taking the 
young child of an Australian savage and of bringing it 
up side by side with an average European child, taking 
pains to give them exactly the same education in every 
respect, he would certainly have widely different results 
in the end ; in the one case he would have to do with a 
well-organized instrument, ready to give out good intel- 
lectual notes, and a fine harmony of moral feeling when 
properly handled ; in the other case, an imperfectly organ- 
ized instrument, from which it would be out of the power 
of the most patient and skillful touch to elicit more than 
a few feeble intellectual notes, and a very rude and primi- 
tive sort of moral feeling, a little better feeling, cer- 
tainly, than that of its fathers, but still most primitive ; 
for many savages regard as virtues most of the big 
vices and crimes, such as theft, rape, murder, at any 
rate, when they are practiced at the expense of neigh- 



language is stated to have contained no verb meaning "to love," so that 
when the Bible was translated by the missionaries into that language, it 
was necessary to invent a word for that purpose. He cites a French writer 
to show that the Samoyedes of Siberia show little affection for their wives 
and " daignent d peine four dire tine parole de douceur." Many other instances 
might be adduced to illustrate this remarkable fact, but these are sufficient 
to show that in one very important circumstance at any rate the early races 
did not approach the more civilized nations. 



40 HUMAN DISCORDS 

boring - tribes.* Their moral feeling, such as it is, is ex- 
tremely circumscribed, being limited in application to 
the tribe. In civilized society we have, happily, got a 
step further than that, since we are not as savages are, 
and our forefathers probably were, divided into a mul- 
titude of tribes eager to injure and even extirpate one 
another from motives of tribal patriotism, f No doubt 
we have reached a much higher pitch of moral feeling 
now, but there is plainly room yet for a wider expan- 
sion, and mankind seems to be far off the gaol of its 
high calling, so long as divided into jealous and hostile 
nations it suffers national divisions to limit the applica- 
tion of moral feeling. 

Now, what do the discoveries of science warrant us 
to conclude respecting the larger and more complex 
brain of the civilized man, and its higher capacities of 
thought and feeling ? They teach us this ; that it has 
reached its higher level not by any sudden and big cre- 
ative act, nor by a succession of small creative acts, but 
by the slow and gradual operation of processes of nat- 
ural evolution going on through countless ages. Each 
new insight into natural phenomena on the part of man, 

* The wife of an Australian savage having died of some disease, he in- 
formed Dr. Lander that he would go and kill a woman of a distant tribe, so 
that his wife's spirit might have rest. Forbidden imperatively to do so, and 
threatened with imprisonment if he did, he became wretched and wasted 
away ; but he disappeared eventually, and was absent for some time. When 
he re-appeared he was in good condition, for he had succeeded in killing a 
woman ; his sorrow because of a sacred duty omitted had disappeared, his 
tribal moral feeling was satisfied, and his bodily nutrition sympathized with 
the restored animation of his mind. — American Journal of Insanity, July, 
1871. 

fThe story of Jael and Sisera is instructive in this respect ; the light 
in which she was regarded for her abuse of the sacred rite of Eastern hospi- 
tality showing the limited range of moral feeling at that time. — -Judges, v. 
24-27. 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 41 

each act of wiser doing founded on truer insight, each 
bettered feeling which has been developed by wiser con- 
duct, has tended to determine by degrees a correspond- 
ing structural change of the brain, which has been trans- 
mitted, as an innate endowment, to succeeding genera- 
tions, just as the acquired habit of a parent animal be- 
comes sometimes the instinct of its offspring, and the 
accumulated results of these slow and minute gains 
transmitted by hereditary action, have culminated in the 
higher cerebral organization in which they now are, as it 
were, capitalized. Thus the added structure embodies in it- 
self the superior intellectual and moral capabilities of ab- 
stract reasoning and moral feeling, which have been the 
slow acquisitions of the ages, and it gives them out again 
in its functions when it discharges its functions rightly. 
If one of our remote pre-historic ancestors were to come 
to life among us now, we should have more or less of an 
imbecile, who could not compete on equal terms with 
other persons, but must perish, unless charitably cared 
for, just as the low savage whose brain is destitute of the 
higher nervous substrata of thought and feeling perishes, 
when he comes in contact and competition with the 
white man. The only way in which the native savage 
can be raised to the level of civilized thought and feel- 
ing must be, if it shall be, by cultivation through many 
generations, by a process of evolution similar to that 
which lies back between our savage ancestors and us. 

That is one aspect of the operation of natural law 
in human events, the operation of the law of heredity 
in development in carrying mankind forward, that is, to 
a higher level of being. It teaches us plainly enough 
that the highest qualities of mind bear witness to the 
reign of law in nature as certainly as do the lowest prop- 



4* HUMAN DISCORDS. 

erties of matter, and that if we are to go on progressing 
in time to come it must be by the observation of, and 
obedience to, the laws of development. 

There is, however, another important aspect of the 
law of heredity which it concerns us to bear sincerely in 
mind, its operation in working out human degeneracy, 
in carrying mankind downward, that is, to a lower level 
of being. It is certain that man may degenerate as well 
as develop ; that he has been doing so both as nation 
and individual, ever since we have records of his doings 
on earth. In many regions of the globe there have 
been a succession of partial civilizations that have been 
followed by periods of barbarism ; some of the savages 
of to-day are the heirs of higher races that have per- 
ished. There is a broad and easy way of dissolution, 
national, social, and individual, which is the opposite of 
the steep and narrow way of evolution. In the flowing 
tide of progress there are innumerable ebbing waves. 
Now what it behooves us to realize distinctly is that 
there is not anything more miraculous about the degen- 
eration or extinction of a nation, or a family, than there 
is about its rise and development ; that both are the 
work of natural law. A nation does not sink into de- 
cadence, I presume, so long as it keeps fresh those vir- 
tues of character through which it became great among 
nations ; it is when it suffers them to be eaten away by 
luxury, corruption, and other enervating vices, that it 
undergoes that degeneration of character which prepares 
and makes easy its overthrow. In like manner a family 
reckless of the laws of physical and moral hygiene, may 
go through a process of degeneracy until it becomes ex- 
tinct. What we call mental derangement is truly in 
most cases a form of human degeneracy, a phase in the 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 43 

working out of it ; and if this degeneracy were suffered 
to take its course through generations the natural termi- 
nation would be extinction of the family. If a man 
will but make himself the subject of serious scientific 
study, he shall find that this working out of degeneracy 
through generations affords him a rational explanation 
of most of those evil impulses of the heart which he 
has been content to attribute to the wiles and instiga- 
tions of the devil ; that the evil spirit which has taken 
possession of the wicked man is often the legacy of 
parental or ancestral error, misfortune, or wrong doing. 
Let us take for the purpose of illustrating by ex- 
ample the nature and bearing of this scientific study a 
case which every physician who has had much expe- 
rience must have been asked some time or other to 
consider and advise about ; a quite young child which 
is causing its parents alarm and distress by the preco- 
cious display of vicious desires and tendencies of all 
sorts that are quite out of keeping with its tender 
years, and by the utter failure of either precept, or ex- 
ample, or punishment, to imbue it with good feeling 
and with the desire to do right. It may not be no- 
tably deficient in intelligence ; on the contrary it may 
be capable of learning quickly, when it likes, and ex- 
tremely cunning in lying, in stealing, in gratifying 
other perverse inclinations ; and it cannot be said not 
to know right from wrong, since it invariably eschews 
the right and chooses the wrong, showing an amazing 
acuteness in escaping detection, and the punishment 
which follows detection. It is in truth, congenitally 
conscienceless, by nature destitute of moral sense, and 
actively imbued with immoral sense. Now this unfor- 
tunate creature is of so tender an age that the theory 



44 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

of satanic agency is not thought to offer an adequate 
explanation of its evil impulses ; in the end everybody 
who has to do with it feels that it is not responsible 
for its vicious conduct, perceives that punishment does 
not, and cannot, in the least, reform it, and is per- 
suaded that there is some native defect of mind which 
renders it a proper case for medical advice. 

To show that this portrait is no exaggerated fancy 
sketch let me relate a case described by Mr. Haslam — 
a boy ten years of age who was sent to the Bethlehem 
Hospital to be cared for. The history of the case is 
as follows : 

The parents are persons of sound mind and they 
do not remember any branches of their respective fam- 
ilies to have been in any manner disordered in their 
intellects. The subject of the present relation was 
their eldest son ; the second child was of a disposition 
remarkably mild ; and the youngest, a boy of about 
two and a half years, was distinguished by the irrita- 
bility and impatience of his temper. At the age of 
two years the subject of the present relation became 
so mischievous and uncontrollable that he was sent 
from home to be nursed by his aunt. In this situa- 
tion he continued until he was nearly nine years old ; 
the creature of volition and the terror of the family ; 
at this time the advice of a physician was sought. 
Different systems of management were adopted, indul- 
gence in every wish and correction for each individual 
perverseness, or impropriety of conduct. He would 
neither dress nor undress himself, though capable of 
both ; when his hands were at liberty he tore his 
clothes; he broke everything that was presented to him, 
or came within his reach, and frequently refused to 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 45 

take food. He gave answers only to such questions 
as pleased him, and acted in opposition to every direc- 
tion. His aunt exercised this plan for several months, 
but perhaps not to the extent laid down ; for it may 
be presumed that after a few flagellations her humanity 
prevailed. He was of a very healthy appearance, and 
his head was well formed. His tongue was unusually 
thick, though his articulation was perfectly distinct. 
His countenance is described as decidedly "maniacal," 
a complex term for many ideas not very easy to be 
defined. His stature for his age was short, but 
he was well compacted and possessed great bodily 
strength. His skin was smooth and clear, though some- 
what deficient in sensibility ; his pulse was natural, 
appetite good but not inordinate. He slept soundly, 
and seemed to require a considerable duration of sleep, 
though he often awoke as if suddenly alarmed. He 
had a very retentive memory, and had made as great 
proficiency in speech as the generality of boys at his 
age. Few circumstances appeared to give him pleas- 
ure, but he would describe very correctly anything 
which had delighted him. He had been several times 
at school but as he lacked the power of continued at- 
tention, and was only attracted by fits and starts, he 
was the hopeless pupil of many masters, distinguished 
for their patience and rigid discipline ; it may, therefore, 
be concluded that from these gentlemen he derived all 
the benefits which could result from privations to his 
stomach and from the application of the rod to the more 
delicate parts of his skin. 

Mr. Haslam says : " On the first interview I had 
w T ith him he contrived after two or three minutes' ac- 
quaintance to break a window and tear the frill of my 



46 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

shirt. He was an unrelenting foe to all china, glass, and 
crockery ware ; whenever they came within his reach he 
shivered them instantly. In walking the street the 
keeper was compelled to take the wall as he uni- 
formly broke the windows if he could get near them, 
and his operation was performed so dextrously and with 
such safety to himself that he never cut his ringers. To 
tear lace and destroy the finer textures of female orna- 
ment seemed to gratify him exceedingly, and he seldom 
walked out without finding an occasion of indulging 
this propensity. He never became attached to any in- 
ferior animal ; to these creatures his conduct was that of 
a brute ; he oppressed the feeble and avoided the society 
of those more powerful than himself. When he was 
spoken to he usually said : ' Now I will look unpleas- 
ant.' The usual games of children afforded him no 
amusement ; whenever boys were at play he never 
joined them ; he appeared incapable of forming a friend- 
ship with anyone ; he felt no consideration for sex, and 
would as readily kick or bite a girl as a boy. Of kind, 
ness shown him he was equally insensible ; he would re- 
ceive an orange as a present, and afterwards throw it in 
the face of the donor. To the man who looked after 
him he appeared to entertain something like an attach- 
ment ; when this person went out of the room he raised 
a loud outcry, and said : ' What will become of me if he 
goes away ? I like him, for he carries the cane which 
makes me a good boy.' The man seemed to be of a 
different opinion, however, for he said, when he grew 
older he should be afraid to continue with him, as he 
was persuaded the boy would destroy him, whenever he 
found the means and opportunity. Of his own disorder 
he was sometimes sensible ; he would often express a 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 47 

wish to die, for, he said, ' God had not made him like 
other children.' During the time he remained at Beth- 
lehem, I conducted him through the hospital and pointed 
out to him several patients who were chained in their 
cells ; he discovered no fear or alarm ; and when a mis- 
chievous maniac, who was more strictly confined than 
the rest, was shown him, he said : ' This would be the 
right place for me.' Considering the duration of his in- 
sanity, and being ignorant of any means by which he 
was likely to recover, he was returned to his friends 
after remaining a few weeks in London."* 

Where, then, is the fault that a human being is born 
into the world who will go wrong, nay, who must go 
wrong, in virtue of a bad organization ? How comes it 
that an individual capable of looking before and after, 
remembering the retribution of past sin and the Nemesis 
that awaits a future wrong doing is so forgetful of true 
self interest as to yield to evil impulses ? And whence 
do these impulses come ? One thing is certain, Moral 
Philosophy cannot penetrate the hidden springs of feel- 
ing and impulse, they lie deeper than it can reach, for 
they lie in the physical constitution of the individual, 
and going still farther back, perhaps in his organic ante- 
cedents. Moral Philosophy may make its hard and fast 
lines, and lay down abstract propositions concerning the 
power of will in the conduct of life, but when we have 
to do with concrete cases it is plain that no such definite 
lines can be applied, and that abstract propositions are 
only true of a certain proportion of mankind. More- 
over, it appears also that those of whom they are true, 
have much less merit in the matter, and those of whom 
they are not true, much less blame than moral philoso- 

*" Observations on Madness." John Haslam, London, 1809, Page 198. 



48 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

phers are apt to imagine and inculcate. The fate of in- 
heritance, which constitutes the misfortune of the latter, 
constitutes also the virtue of the former. His father 
and mother, his grandfather and grandmother, are latent 
or declare themselves in him ; and it is on the lines laid 
down in his nature that his development has proceeded. 
Humanity is contained in the individual ; whatever act 
of vice, folly, crime, or madness one man has perpe- 
trated, each man has in him the potentiality of perpe- 
trating. It is not by virtue of education so much as by 
virtue of inheritance that he is brave or timid, generous 
or selfish, prudent or reckless, boastful or modest, quick 
or placid in temper ; the ground tone of his character is 
original in him, and it colors all the subsequently 
formed emotions and their sympathetic ideas. As in 
one word ages of human culture are summed up,* 
so in one mortal are summed up generations of human 
existence ; in his nature as in his knowledge man is the 
inheritor of the acquisitions of the past, the heir of all 
the ages. 

Instead of regarding the mind as it were from the 
center, one should approach the consideration of it by 
degrees from the circumference ; instead of starting 
with man as the immediate object of philosophy, let 
us start from the outer inert world, at the disposal of 
physical and chemical forces ; what do we see result ? 
Another world where the forms individualize themselves 
and of which the continued mobility attests the pres- 
ence of new agents ! Minerals, plants, animals detach 
themselves, and appear to us as the steps of evolution 
in nature rising higher and higher. And man ! he ap- 

*"Some Lessons of Antiquity." An address delivered at the Man- 
sion House, 23d of February, 1889, by Prof. F. Max Muller. 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 49 

pears at the summit of this vast series, species among 
the species, individual in his species. But between 
the species and the individual is there not yet some- 
thing? Between the human type, as it can be anatom- 
ically defined, and this same type as it manifests itself 
in each one of us, is there not a gap ? And the gap 
is filled by the very history of the human species ; for 
we pertain to races, to varieties of the human race, 
and we all accept the heritage of a long past ; we 
have, if we may be permitted to employ the expression, 
a historical mind — we are one of the links of a long 
chain. 

However great may be the discoveries that are yet 
to be made, it is an assured principle that humanity 
has not always been exactly similar to itself. The ideas 
which constitute our most precious patrimony have had 
their history ; civilizations which are nothing else than 
the aggregate of ideas dominant at a certain epoch, 
and in certain countries, have not been servile copies 
one of another ; mental enlightenment has changed its 
place ; but at the same time it has increased. This 
historic mind of which the first impulses and the most 
spontaneous testimony remains lost in the darkness of 
the past, develops itself from age to age, from nation 
to nation ; never definitely fixing itself upon one par- 
ticular religion, aesthetics, or philosophy ; the mind, 
wafted by a favorable wind, seeks new shores, and the 
world seems to be colored with clearer light. These 
periods of excitement are never wasted ; nothing is lost ; 
nothing is useless ; the impulse once given diffuses itself, 
extends itself, and never stops. If we take the words 
which express the thoughts of a high mental culture 
and trace their origin and the gradual development of 



50 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

their meanings, what a succession of human experiences, 
rising in complexity is displayed ! There is not an ab- 
stract term that does not mean generations of human 
culture. Let us take in like manner the human being 
and trace back through the long record of ages the 
steps of his genesis, or examine rather the resolution 
of his essential human nature into its lower elements, 
as exhibited in the degenerate acts of this child, and 
we shall cease to be surprised at phenomena which the 
young creature never could have acquired, and which, 
so far as its conscious life is concerned, appears strangely 
precocious and inexplicable. We are witnesses of a 
retrograde metamorphosis of humanity, of the undoing 
of what has been done through ages, of the formless 
ruin of carefully fashioned form. 

We can seldom find the exact cause and trace de- 
finitely the mode of its operation ; the study is much 
too complex and difficult for such exactness at present, 
but we shall not fail to discover the broad fact of the 
frequency of mental degeneracy in the direct line of 
the child's ancestors. The influence of systematic cul- 
ture upon anyone is no doubt great, but that which de- 
termines the limit, and even in some degree the nature 
of the effect of culture, that which forms the foundation 
upon which all the modifications of art must rest, is the 
inherited nature. 

Many an experience in life teaches the individual 
who has had the blessing of a good parentage, how 
incalculable is his debt ; when compelled to act at critical 
moments, or under difficult and trying circumstances, 
to which he was not consciously equal, or under great 
temptation to do wrong, or in any other case in which 
his art has failed him, he shall have cause to bless the 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 5 I 

nature which he has inherited, to give thanks for the 
reserve force of a sound and vigorous character which 
his parents have endowed him with, and which has stood 
him in good stead, and inspired him, as his leisurely 
consideration proves, to do rightly when he knew not 
what he was doing. Better than all his pastors and 
masters can teach him, it will enable him to meet his 
last fate with becoming dignity, in the hour of death 
and in the day of judgment. 

The individual's nature is beneath his art ; if sound 
it will come to his rescue when culture fails him ; if 
unsound it will overthrow him in the hour of trial in 
spite of culture.* 

Instances sometimes occur in young children of 
blind destructive impulse, or even of persistent homi- 
cidal desire. Romberg met with a child six years old 
which suffered from attacks of blind destructive im- 
pulse, in which it smashed to pieces whatever it could, 
rushed into the street with a knife in its hand and 
could scarce be restrained, f 

In younger children of three or four years old, 
attacks of shrieking, wild refractoriness, rage, biting, 
and destructive propensities, which occur periodically, 
are sometimes met with. And if anyone should think 
that these are instances of early depravity what will he 
say to the case of a child raving mad immediately after 
birth. Chrichton quotes such a case. When four days 
old he possessed so much strength in his legs and arms, 
that four women could, at times with difficulty restrain 
him. These paroxysms either ended with an inde- 

* " Man fancies that he determines his life, that he guides himself, 
and all the while his nature is an irresistable part of his destiny." — Goethe's 
Egmont. 

\ Deutsche Klinik, 1851, p. 178. 



52 HUMAN DISCORDS 

scribable laughter, for which no evident reason could 
be observed, or else he tore in anger everything near 
him, which he could tear, clothes, linen, bed furniture, 
and even thread, when he could get hold of it. When 
he began to have teeth, he died.* The case seems to 
be an example of sensorial insanity, and is not unlike 
those cases in which convulsions prove fatal to young 
children. The earliest acts of the new-born child are 
reflex, and these, when there is a morbid condition of 
nerve element, may become convulsions. To the re- 
flex acts follow consensual or sensational acts ; and these, 
when there is a morbid state of the sensory ganglia, 
became the tearing, biting, and unnatural laughter of 
the insane infant. In the animal, where the nervous 
center of idea is but imperfectly developed, the insanity 
is also sensorial. 

A child may be afflicted also at an early age with 
a persistent morbid homicidal desire. A well-known 
case is recorded by Esquirol in which a girl aged seven 
and a half years manifested a fixed desire to kill her 
stepmother, who had always treated her kindly. The 
grandmother had, in the child's hearing, expressed her 
dissatisfaction with its father's second marriage, without 
foreseeing the effect which might be produced on a 
child then only two years old.f To sensational respond- 
ence to external nature succeeds, in the order of mental 
development, ideational reaction ; and when ideational 
activity is first beginning, it is not difficult to implant an 
idea which may long abide. 

Another case of a girl, aged seven years and a half, 
who made repeated attempts to injure and kill her 

*Op., Cit., Vol. II, Appendix, p. 355. 

f " Traite des Maladies Mentales," Tome II., p. 115. 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 53 

mother, is related by Parent-Duchatelet ;* the morbid 
tension of the ganglionic cells had been brought about 
in this case by a well-recognized cause of disturbance at 
all ages. 

How are we to account for those cases of juvenile 
suicide so often recorded, where the dreadful propensity 
is excited by the most trivial causes ? Medical literature 
is rich in such examples. 

Physiologically, psychologically and pathologically, 
we are brought back to the same conclusion, namely, 
that the unconscious action of the organism is a deeper 
fact than its conscious action, that the real conditions 
of mental action must be investigated in regions of 
which introspective consciousness gives no account. 
What real meaning is there in saying, that "man is con- 
scious to himself of faculties not comprised within the 
chain of physical necessity," when a blow on the head, 
or the virus of a fever, or any such physical cause, in a 
moment lays low the highest faculties of the proudest 
metaphysician ? The unrelenting circle of necessity en- 
compasses all. One may go his destined course with 
tranquil resignation, and another may fret and fume, 
but willingly or unwillingly both must go. The cage 
may be a larger or a smaller one, but the bars are al- 
ways there. " Where wast thou when I laid the foun- 
dations of the earth ? Canst thou bind the sweet in- 
fluences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion ? Canst 
thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season ? Or canst 
thou gird Arcturus with his sons? Then Job answered 
and said : ' Behold, I am vile ; what shall I answer 
thee? I will lay my hand upon my mouth.'" On what 

* " Annales d' Hygiene publique et de Medicine legale," Tome VII., p. 
173, et suiv, Paris, 1832. 



54 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

foundation can mental science surely rest save on a care- 
ful induction from all available facts, whether they are 
called physiological or psychical ? " Happy they," says 
Goethe, " who soon detect the chasm that lies between 
their wishes and their powers." 

One of the most extraordinary instances of the op- 
eration of this law in working out moral degeneracy 
without any perceivable weakening of the intellectual 
faculty is the case of Servin, described in the Duke of 
Sully's " Memoirs of Henry IV. of France," and which 
Dr. Rush regarded as a case of "universal moral de- 
rangement." 

Sully says : — " Just before my departure from Calais, 
old Servin came and presented his son to me, and 
begged I would use my endeavors to make him a man of 
some worth and honesty ; but he confessed it was what 
he dared not hope, not through any want of understand- 
ing or capacity in the young man, but from his natural 
inclination to all kinds of vice. The old man was in the 
right ; for what he told me having excited my curiosity 
to gain a thorough knowledge of young Servin, I found 
him to be at once both a wonder and a monster ; for I 
can give no other idea of that assemblage of the most 
excellent and most pernicious qualities. Let the reader 
represent to himself a man of genius so lively, and an 
understanding so extensive, as rendered him acquainted 
with almost everything that could be known ; of so vast 
and ready a comprehension that he immediately made 
himself master of whatever he attempted, and of so pro- 
digious a memory that he never forgot what he had once 
learned. He possessed all parts of philosophy and the 
mathematics, particularly fortification and drawing ; even 
in theology he was so well skilled that he was an excel- 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 55 

lent preacher whenever he had a mind to exert that tal- 
ent, and an able disputant for and against the reformed 
religion indifferently. He not only understood Greek, 
Hebrew, and all the languages which we call learned, 
but also all the different jargons or modern dialects ; he 
accented and pronounced them so naturally, and so per- 
fectly imitated the gestures and manners both of the 
several nations of Europe, and the particular provinces 
of France, that he might have been taken for a native of 
all or any of these countries ; and this quality he applied 
to counterfeit all sorts of persons, wherein he succeeded 
wonderfully ; he was, moreover, the best comedian and 
greatest droll that, perhaps, ever appeared ; he had a 
genius for poetry, and had written many verses ; he 
played upon almost all instruments, was a perfect master 
of music, and sang most agreeably and justly ; he like- 
wise could say mass, for he was of a disposition to do, as 
well as to know, all things ; his body was perfectly well 
suited to his mind, he was light, nimble, dextrous, and fit 
for all exercises ; he could ride well, and in dancing, wrest- 
ling, and leaping, he was admired ; there are no games of 
recreation that he did not know ; and he was skilled in 
almost all mechanic arts. But now for the reverse of the 
medal. Here it appeared that he was treacherous, cruel, 
cowardly, deceitful ; a liar, a cheat, a drunkard and glut- 
ton ; a sharper in play, immersed in every species of vice, 
a blasphemer, an atheist ; in a word, in him might be 
found all the vices contrary to nature, honor, religion and 
society ; the truth of which he evinced with his latest 
breath, for he died in the flower of his age, in a low 
house, perfectly corrupted by his debaucheries, and ex- 
pired with a glass in his hand, cursing and denying God." * 

*" Memoirs of the Duke of Sully, Prime Minister to Henry the Great," 
Vol. III., p. 35. 



56 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

If it be a question in this instance whether controll- 
able vice, or uncontrollable impulse, would the more 
properly characterize the case of this young man, we 
may, I think, reasonably conclude that there was some 
constitutional peculiarity. Whether or not we hesitate 
to pronounce him wholly irresponsible, we may agree 
with Rush, that "such persons are, in a pre-eminent de- 
gree, objects of compassion, and that it is the business 
of medicine to aid law in preventing and curing their 
moral alienation of mind." (Op. cit, p. 358.) 

It is, indeed, most certain that men are not bred 
well or ill by accident any more than animals are ; but 
while most persons are ready to acknowledge this fact 
in a general way, very few pursue the admission to its 
exact and vigorous consequences, and fewer still suffer 
it to influence their conduct. 

An extraordinary example of the perpetuation of 
the criminal class by heredity is afforded by the history 
of the infamous Jukes family, whose pedigree has been 
made out with singular care, notwithstanding the va- 
grant habits, illegitimate unions, and extreme untruthful- 
ness, to which this particular class of humanity is dis- 
posed. It has been traced during no less than seven 
generations, and is the subject of an elaborate memoir 
printed in the Thirty-first Annual Report of the Prison 
Association of New York, 1876. It includes no less 
than 540 individuals of jukes blood, of whom a fright- 
ful number degraded into criminality, pauperism, or 
disease. It is difficult to summarize the results in a 
few plain figures, but those respecting the fifth genera- 
tion, through the eldest of the five prolific daughters of 
the man who is the common ancestor of the race, may 
be stated. 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 57 

The total number of these was 123, of whom thirty- 
eight came through an illegitimate granddaughter, and 
eighty-five through legitimate grandchildren. Out of 
the thirty-eight, sixteen have been in jail, sixteen for 
heinous offenses, one of these having been committed 
no less than nine times ; eleven others led openly dis- 
reputable lives, or were paupers ; the history of three 
had not been traced, and only four are known to have 
done well. 

The great majority of the women consorted with 
criminals. As to the eighty-five legitimate descendants, 
they were less flagrantly bad, for only five of them had 
been in jail, and only thirteen had been paupers. 

Now, the ancestor of all this mischief, who was 
born about the year 1730, is described ashaving been a 
jolly, companionable sort of man, a hunter, and a fisher, 
a hard drinker, averse to steady labor, but working 
hard and idling by turns, and who had numerous illegiti- 
mate children, whose issue has not been traced. 

He was, in fact, a somewhat good specimen of a 
half-savage, without any seriously criminal instincts. 
The girls were apparently attractive, marrying early and 
sometimes not badly ; but the gypsy-like character of 
the race was unsuited to success in a civilized country. 
So the descendants went to the bad, and such heredi- 
tary moral weaknesses as they may have had, rose to the 
surface and worked their mischief without check. Co- 
habitating with criminals, and being extremely prolific, 
the result was the production of a stock exceeding 500 
in number, of a prevalent criminal type. Through dis- 
ease and intemperance the breed is now rapidly dimin- 
ishing ; the infant mortality has of late been horrible, 
but fortunately the women of the present generation 



58 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

bear usually fewer children, and many of them are alto- 
gether childless. The criminal classes contain a con- 
siderable portion of epileptics, and other persons of 
instable, emotional temperaments, subject to nervous 
explosions which burst out at intervals and relieve the 
system. Their instability of nervous action, irregulari- 
ties of bodily temperature, mobile intellectual activity, 
and extraordinary oscillations between opposed emo- 
tional states give rise to manifestations of extreme 
piety and of extreme vice. These unfortunate beings 
see no incongruity between the pious phrases which 
they pour out at one moment and their vile and ob- 
scene language in the next ; neither do they show 
repentance for past misconduct when they are convicted 
of crimes, however abominable the}^ may be. They are 
creatures of the moment, possessing no inhibitory check 
upon their desires and emotions, which drive them 
headlong hither and thither. From Max Jukes de- 
scended in seventy-five years, 200 thieves and murder- 
ers, 280 invalids attacked by blindness, idiocy, or con- 
sumption, 90 prostitutes, and 300 children who died 
prematurely. The various members of the family cost 
the State more than a million dollars,* 

The inheritance of evil tendencies was strikingly 
exhibited in the history of a family reported by Miss 
Schuyler, President of the New York State Charity 
Aid Society. (New York Times, March 8th, 1878.) 
" Margaret," the " mother of criminals," left behind her 
" a long train of diseases, weaknesses, bad habits, cor- 
rupt and morbid passions, physical and moral degeneracy, 
and open crimes which can never be measured by human 
eye. 

* Dugdale : " The Jukes." 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 5^ 

The female children of the line became mothers, in 
their teens, of illegitimate children ; the boys were 
thieves and vagrants as by a law of nature, as soon as 

they could exercise any activity The children 

grew up in nurseries of crime and became, of course, 
paupers or worse. The stronger and bolder lived by 
thieving, or committed burglary, robbery or murder. 
Crime and indulgence gradually caused the degeneracy 
of some and they became epileptics, lunatics, and idiots. 

Some of this miserable breed reached the age of 

ninety years, and some of the women had at least 
twenty children. The stock of this race of criminals 
was preserved by intermarriage with fresh and vigorous 
families of ruffians. The total number of the race was 
seven hundred, mainly paupers, beggars, prostitutes and 
criminals." 

It is a great pity that men cannot be brought to re- 
alize the important truth, that an inheritance far better 
than land or wealth, which they may leave to their 
children, is that of a good nature — the "confidence of a 
good descent." It is a great blessing, however, that 
when men neglect this truth, nature takes the matter 
out of their hands, and, with the determination that 
progress shall not be frustrated by human follies and 
vices, puts a stop to propagation by sterility and 
idiocy. 

The hereditary kinship which is sometimes traceable 
between crime and insanity I do not purpose to set 
forth in detail ; the subject is discussed fully by Dr. 
Prosper Lucas, in the well-known classic, Traitd philo- 
sophique et physiologique de I ' Httrddite Naturelle ; but 
to make clear what I mean I will give one or two illus- 
trations. Of five children from an insane mother and 



6o HUMAN DISCORDS. 

a drunken father, one was suicidal, two suffered imprison- 
ment for crimes, one daughter was insane, the other was 
imbecile. In Haslam's Work on Madness, under the 
section, " Influence of Heredity," may be found this 
record : — 

M. H. Her father had been several times insane ; 
her mother was likewise so afflicted a few months before 
her death. Afterwards her father married a woman 
perfectly sane by whom he had three children, two 
female and one male ; both the females were melan- 
cholic, the male was a vicious character and had been 
transported. M. H. has had ten children, three have 
died with convulsions, the eldest girl is epileptic. 

M. Morel, of Rouen, relates the history of one 
family which may be shortly summed up thus : — 
First Generation. — Immorality, Alcoholic Excess, 

Moral Brutishness. 
Second Generation. — Hereditary drunkenness, Mani- 
acal attacks, General Paralysis. 
Third Generation. — Sobriety, Hypochondria, Lype- 
mania, Systematic Delirium, Homicidal tenden- 
cies. 
Fourth Generation. - — Feeble intelligence, Stupidity, 
First attack of Mania at 16, Transition to com- 
plete Idiocy ; probable extinction of the race.* 

The case of Christiana Edmonds is a notable 
one : — 

She was convicted of murder, afterwards reprieved 
and sent to an asylum ; her brother died epileptic and 
idiotic ; her sister suffered from mental excitement, and 
once attempted to throw herself out of a window ; her 

*Traite des Degenerescences, de l'Espece Humaine. B. A. Morel, 
Paris, 1857. Page 125. 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 6 I 

mother's father died paralyzed and childish ; a cousin on 
the same side was imbecile ; she had herself been sub- 
ject to somnambulism in childhood, had suffered from 
hysteria later in life, and had finally had an attack of 
hemiplegia ; and at the time of her trial her face drawn 
to one side showed the effect of the hemiplegic attack 
from which she suffered. 

Dr. Maudsley, whose testimony, as an expert in 
the case, is given in the "Journal of Mental Science," 
says : " I had more than an hour's conversation with her 
in Newgate, and, at the end of it, two convictions were 
firmly planted in my mind ; the first that she had no real 
moral appreciation of the nature of her crime, and no 
shadow of a feeling of remorse in regard to it, the sec- 
ond that she would have poisoned a whole city full of 
people, if it had lain in her way to do so, without 
hesitation, compunction, or remorse. Nevertheless, her 
intellect was acute, certainly above the average, and 
showed no signs of disorder. I could only regard her 
case as a strong confirmation of an opinion I have else- 
where expressed, and which I believe to be a just con- 
clusion from facts ; namely, that one occasional result 
of descent from an insane family is a nature entirely 
destitute of moral sense — congenitally defective in that 
respect — whereby the individual is as insensible to the 
moral relations of life, as a person color blind is to cer- 
tain colors."* 

One example more shall suffice to exhibit the alli- 
ance between degenerate types ; it shows the effect of 
crime in one generation of a family upon the mental 
organization of the following generations. 

While the Reign of Terror was going on during 

* " Journal of Mental Science." Vol. xviii, p. 409. 



62 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

the first French Revolution, an innkeeper profited by 
the critical situation in which many nobles of his com- 
mune found themselves, to decoy them into his house, 
where he was believed to have robbed and murdered 
them. His daughter, having quarrelled with him, de- 
nounced him to the authorities, who put him on his 
trial, but he escaped conviction from lack of proof. 
She committed suicide subsequently ; one of her bro- 
thers had nearly murdered her with a knife, and an- 
other brother hanged himself; her sister was paroxysmally 
violent ; her daughter, in whom the degenerate line 
approached extinction, became completely deranged 
and was sent to an asylum.* 

Here, then, is just the sort of pedigree which we 
really want — if we are to judge of the worth of a 
family, — the hereditary line of its vices, virtues, and 
diseases. 

First Generation. — Acute Intelligence, Murder and 
Robbery, Absence or Destruction of Moral 
Sense. 
Second Generation. — Suicide, Homicidal violence and 

suicide, Epilepsy, Imbecility, Mania. 
Third Generation. — Mania. 

It may be said that this was an extreme and excep- 
tional case ; but it is on that account better fitted to 
produce an impression ; and it must be remembered 
that the laws by which its results were worked out are 
laws which are continually at work in accomplishing less 
striking results, and that so-called exceptional cases in 
science are when rightly studied exceptionally useful in 
helping us to discover the laws for which we are search- 
ing. What we wish to prove is that the moral element 

*Moreau, " La Psychologie Morbide," p. 359. 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 63 

is an essential part of a complete and sound character, 
in the present state of human evolution. He who is 
destitute of moral sense is to that extent a defective be- 
ing ; he marks the beginning of race degeneracy ; and if 
better influences do not intervene to check or neutralize 
the morbid tendency, his children will exhibit a further 
degeneracy and be actually morbid varieties. What 
shall be the particular outcome of the morbid strain 
— whether vice, or crime, or madness — will, of course 
depend on the circumstances of life ; the inborn fact 
counts for much, but not for everything, in the result. 
It, or the potentiality of it, is inherited by most per- 
sons, though some appear to be born without it ; it is 
developed by culture, decays by disuse, and is perverted 
or destroyed by disease. 

"Crime," says Dr. Maudsley, "is not always a 
simple affair of yielding to an evil impulse, or a vicious 
passion, which might be checked were ordinary control 
exercised ; it is clearly sometimes the result of an actual 
neurosis which has close relations of nature and de- 
scent to other neuroses ; and this neurosis is the physical 
result of physiological laws of production and evolution. 
The criminal psychosis which is the mental side of the 
neurosis is for the most part an intractable malady, pun- 
ishment being of no avail to produce a permanent re- 
formation. A true reformation would be a reforming 
of the individual nature ; and how can that which has 
been forming through generations be ^formed within 
the period of a single life ? ' Can the Ethiopian change 
his skin, or the leopard his spots ? '" * 

It may be set down then as a fact of observation, 

* Address to the Psychological Section, British Medical Association, 
August 7, 1872, Henry Maudsley, M. D 



64 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

that mental degeneracy in one generation is sometimes 
the evident cause of an innate deficiency or absence of 
moral sense in the next generation. The child bears the 
burden of its ancestral infirmities or wrong doings. It 
was this avenging law of heredity by which guilt brings 
after it its punishment on earth, and the children expiate 
the sins or errors of the parents, that under the name of 
fate or destiny often played so great and grand a part in 
Grecian tragedy ; when the prophetic writers of the 
Bible are read in a natural sense it cannot fail to be seen 
what a stress they laid upon "the confidence of a good 
descent." It was a proverb in Israel, "The fathers have 
eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on 
edge." Here, then, and in this relation, may be noted 
the instructive fact that just as moral feeling was the 
first function to be affected at the beginning of mental 
derangement in the individual, so now the defect or ab- 
sence of it is seen to mark the way of degeneracy 
through generations. 

It was the latest acquisition of mental evolution ; it 
is the first to go in mental dissolution. 

A second fact of observation may be set down as 
worthy of observation, if not of immediate acceptation, 
namely, that an absence of moral feeling in one genera- 
tion, as shown by a mean, selfish, and persistent disre- 
gard of moral action in the conduct of life, may be the 
cause of mental derangement in the next generation. 
In fact, a person may succeed in producing insanity in 
his progeny by a persistent disuse of moral feeling, and 
a continuous exercise throughont his life of those selfish, 
mean, and anti-social tendencies which are a negation of 
the highest moral relations of mankind. He does not 
ever exercise the nervous substrata which minister to 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 65 

moral functions, wherefore they undergo atrophy in 
him, and he runs the risk of transmitting them to his 
progeny in so imperfect a state that they are incapable 
of full development in them ; just as the instinct of an 
animal which is not exercised for many generations, on 
account of changed conditions of life, becomes less dis- 
tinct by degrees, and, in the end, perhaps, extinct. In 
sober truth the lessons of morality which were pro- 
claimed by the prophets of old as indispensable to the 
stability and well being of families and nations, were 
not mere visions of vague fancy ; founded upon actual 
observation and intuition of the laws of nature working 
in human events they were insights into the eternal 
truths of human evolution.* 

Whether, then, man goes upwards or downwards, 
undergoes development or degeneration, we have equally 
to do with matters of stern law. Provision has been 
made for both ways ; it has been left to him to find out 
and to determine which way he shall take. And it is 
plain that he must find the right path of evolution, and 
avoid the wrong path of degeneracy, by observation and 
experience, pursuing the same method of positive in- 
quiry which has served him so well in the different 
sciences. 

Being preeminently and essentially a social being, 

* The most ancient books of the Parsees, the Zend-Avesta, proclaim, 
under the form of a myth, the operation of the law of heredity, in respect to 
the moral nature; (Zend-Avesta, Vol. iii., pp. 351-378); the book of Mo- 
saism, the Bible, reproduces this myth in its first pages, from whence the 
legends and traditions of Islamism have been borrowed ; (Apercu historique 
sur le temps anttl-islamiques. Revue indt!pendante. Perron, directeur de l'ecole 
de Medecine du Caire, Vol. V., pp. 445-450) ; the evangelists put, two several 
times, into the mouth of Christ, the knowledge of the principle which he 
revives, first, in the discourse on judgment, and in a parable ; (Matthew, 
chap, xii., verse 33) ; secondly, in the most daring reproach directed against 
the Pharasees (Matthew, chap, xxiii., verses 29-34). 



66 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

each one the member of one body — the unit, that is, in 
the social organism — the laws which he has to observe 
and obey are not the physical laws of nature only, but 
also those higher laws which govern the relations of in- 
dividuals in the social state. If he makes his observa- 
tions sincerely and adequately in this way he cannot fail 
to perceive that the laws of morality were not really 
miraculous revelations from heaven, any more than was 
the discovery of the law of gravitation, but that they 
were essential conditions of social evolution, and were 
learned practically by the stern lessons of experience. 
He has learned his duty to his neighbor as he has 
learned his duty to nature; it is implicit in the complex 
society of men dwelling together in peace and unity, and 
it has been revealed explicitly by the intuition of a few 
extraordinary men of sublime moral genius.* 

As it is not a true, it cannot be a useful, notion to 
foster that morality was the special gift to man, and 
is the special property of any theological system, and 
that its life is bound up essentially with the life of 
any such creed. It is not religious creed which has 
invented and been the basis of morality, but morality 
which has been the bulwark of religions. And as a 



* A considerable amount of mischief is done by the complacent vanity 
with which man demonstrates his superior relations to other animals, in 
place of laboring earnestly to develop those relations to something higher 
which undoubtedly exists potentially in him ; for the progression which has 
been observed in nature should rightly be realized in the events of human 
life — in the history of mankind as well as in the history of the individual. 
Were it not that all men are only too glad to pull down the mighty to their 
level, "to pare the mountain to the plain " one might wonder that no one 
has tried to prove these men of genius of a different species from the com- 
mon ruck of mortals — " Ovk blada otl r//nldeoi hi 7/jwcf," as Socrates says 
(Cratylus, ch. xxxii.). They only struggled upwards with success as it is 
the beneficent purpose of nature that all should do. 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 67 

matter of fact, it is certain that morality has suffered 
many times, not a little from its connection with theo- 
logical creeds ; that its truths have been appropriated 
and used to support demoralizing superstitions which 
were no part of it ; that doctrines essentially immoral 
have been even taught in the name of religion ; and 
that religious systems, in their struggles to establish 
their supremacy, have oftentimes shown small respect 
to the claims of morality.* 

Had religion been true to its nature and function, 
as wide as morality and humanity, it should have been 
the bond of unity to hold mankind together in one 
brotherhood, linking them in good feeling, good will, 
and good work toward one another. 

If we would learn to reason closely, we must learn 
to be good doubters. Doubt, determined doubt, is the 
only key which unlocks the caskets of certain knowl- 
edge. We have so many lame philosophies because 
we have so few thorough doubters. It is not the spirit 
of doubt, as bishops and parsons sing, which hinders 
the progress of truth and religion ; but the spirit of 
assumption. Why have we all these disgraceful divis- 
ions, wranglings, and heart-burnings in science and 
theology ? It is not because men will doubt too much, 
but because they will not doubt enough. It is be- 
cause they hate the trouble of doubting in themselves, 
and resent its reasonable demands in others, that we 
are flooded with sham philosophies, superstitions and 
infidelities. 

Fortunate is it, then, for the interests of morality 
that it is not bound up essentially with any form of 

*See "History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages." Henry C. 
Lea, New York, 1887. 

" History of European Morals." W. E. H. Lecky, New York, 1869. 



68 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

religious creed, but that it survives when creeds die, 
having its more secure foundations in the hard won 
experience of mankind. 

The inquiry which, taking a sincere survey of the 
facts, finds the basis and sanction of morality in ex- 
perience, by no means arrives in the end at easy les- 
sons of self-indulgence for the individual and the race, 
but on the contrary at the hardest lessons of self- 
renunciation. Disclosing to man the stern and uniform 
reign of law in nature, even in the evolution and de- 
generacy of his own nature, it takes from him the 
comfortable but demoralizing doctrine that he or 
others can escape the penalty of his ignorance, error, 
or wrong doings, either by penitence or prayer, and 
holds him to the strictest account for them. Discard- 
ing the notion that the observed uniformity of nature 
is but a uniformity of sequence at will, which may be 
interrupted whenever its interruption is earnestly enough 
asked for, a notion which were it more than lip doc- 
trine must necessarily deprive him of his most urgent 
motive to study patiently the laws of nature in order 
to conform to them, it enforces a stern feeling of re- 
sponsibility to search out painfully the right path of 
obedience and to follow it, inexorably laying upon man 
the responsibility of the future of his race. 

If it be most certain, as it is, that all disobedience 
of natural law, whether physical or moral, is avenged 
inexorably in its consequences on earth, either upon the 
individual himself, or more often, perhaps, upon others, 
that the violated law cannot be bribed to stay its arm 
by burnt offerings, nor placated by prayers, it is a harm- 
ful doctrine as tending directly to undermine under- 
standing and to weaken will, to teach that either prayer 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 69 

or sacrifice will obviate the consequences of want of 
foresight or want of self-discipline, or that reliance upon 
supernatural aid will make amends for lack of intelli- 
gent will. We read and we do well to read regularly 
the ten commandments, and we still pray half heartedly 
in our churches — as our forefathers prayed with their 
whole hearts —that our hearts may be inclined to keep 
them. Yet is there a person of sincere understanding 
who, uttering that prayer, does not know well that, if 
it is to be answered, he must cleanse his hands, purify 
his heart, and put in force, in his moral world, those 
other sanitary measures which experience has proved to 
be efficacious, and that the aid vouchsafed to the 
prayer will only be given when these are by themselves 
succesful ? To get rid of the notion of supernatural in- 
tervention is the essential condition of true knowledge 
and self-help in this matter. 

If the matter be made one simply of scientific ob- 
servation it must be confessed that all the evidence goes 
to prove that the events of the moral world are mat- 
ters of law and order equally with those of the physical 
world, and that supernatural interpositions have no more 
place in the one than in the other ; that he who prays 
for the creation of a clean heart and the renewal of a 
right spirit within him, if he gets at last what he prays 
for, gets it by the operation of the ordinary laws of 
moral growth and development, in consequence of pains- 
taking watchfulness over himself, and the continual ex- 
ercise of good resolves. Only when he gets it in that 
way will he get the benefit of Supernatural aid ; and if 
he rests in the belief of supernatural aid, without taking 
pains to get it entirely in that way, he will do himself 
moral harm ; for if he cannot rely upon special inter- 



70 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

positions in the moral any more than in the physical 
world, if he has to do entirely with those secondary laws 
of nature, through which alone the supernatural is made 
natural, the invisible visible, it needs no demonstration 
that the opposite belief cannot strengthen but must 
weaken the understanding and the will. It is plain that 
true moral hygiene is as impossible to him who relies 
upon supernatural power to change his heart, to the 
neglect of the proper means provided, as sanitary science 
is impossible to the savage who relies upon his fetich to 
stay a pestilence or plague and neglects to clean away dirt* 
When it is properly understood, natural science sets 
before man a higher intellectual aim than he is ever 
likely to reach by metaphysical paths and raises a more 
self-sacrificing moral standard. 

* When a great and sudden revolution in the Ego is produced by an 
external cause it is full of hazard to the mental stability of the individual, 
and very apt to become pathological ; nothing is more perilous to the equi- 
librium of a character than for anyone to be placed in entirely changed exter- 
nal circumstances without his inner life having been gradually adapted 
thereto; and madness, when its origin is fairly examined, always means 
discord between the individual and his circumstances. Dr. Channing, in a 
sermon On the Evil of Sin, speaking of the absurdity of the notion that in 

changing worlds there will be a change of character, says : " In the 

first place, it contradicts all our experience of the nature and the laws of 
the mind. There is nothing more striking in the mind than the connection 
of its successive states. Our present knowledge, thoughts, feelings, and 
characters, are the result of former impressions, passions, and pursuits. 
We are in this moment what the past made us ; and to suppose that, at 
death, the influences of our whole past course are to cease on our minds, 
and that a character is to spring up altogether at war with what has pre- 
ceded it, is to suppose the most important law or principle of the mind to be 
violated, is to destroy all analogy between the present and future, and 
to substitute for experience the wildest dreams of fancy. In truth, such a 
sudden revolution in the character, as is here supposed, seems to destroy 
man's identity. The individual thus transformed can hardly seem to him- 
self or to others the same being. It is equivalent to the creation of a new 
soul."— "The Works of William E. Channing, D.D." Vol. IV, p. 159. Bos- 
ton, 1848. 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 7 I 

For when all has been said, it is not the most ele- 
vated or the most healthy business for a man to be occu- 
pied continually with anxieties and apprehensions and 
cares about the salvation of his own soul, and to be 
earnest to do well in this life in order that he may escape 
eternal suffering, and gain eternal happiness, in the life 
to come. An altruistic end, as the prime motive of well 
doing, is the strongest and noblest motive to well doing ; 
with the incarnation of Divine Wisdom, we are taught, 
there was an annihilation of self. Can anyone hesitate to 
declare that it is better for a man's self, and best for his 
kind to have fought with the beasts of unrighteousness 
even if the dead rise not? To make his life subserve 
the good of his kind, to promote the well being of the 
social organization of which he is a unit, is the plain and 
inevitable conclusion which science enforces as to his 
true function and highest development. 

The golden rule of morals was perceived and pro- 
claimed long before it received its highest Christian ex- 
pression.* Modern science teaches no new morality. 
It simply brings men back to that which has been the 
central lesson and real stay of the great religions of the 
world, and which is implicit in the constitution of society, 
and it does this in a way that promises to bring the 

* There appears to be no doubt that Confucius, among others, had the 
clearest apprehension of it and expressly taught it ; and the Buddhist reli- 
gion of perfection is certainly founded upon self-conquest and self-sacrifice. 
They are its very corner-stone; the purification of the mind from unholy de- 
sires and passions, and a devotion to the good of others, which rises to an 
enthusiasm for humanity in order to escape the miseries of this life and to 
attain to a perfect moral repose. " Let all the sins that have been commit- 
ted fall upon me, in order that the world may be delivered," Buddha says. 
And of the son or disciple of Buddha it is said : " When reviled he revileth 
not again ; when smitten he bears the blow without resentment ; when 
treated with anger and passion he returns love and good will ; when threat- 
ened with death he bears no malice." 



72 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

understanding into entire harmony with the will, and to 
promote by a close and consistent interaction their ac- 
cordant growth and development ; it strips morality of 
the livery of superstition, in which theological creeds 
have dressed it, and presents it to the adoration of 
mankind in its natural purity and strength. Mighty, it 
must be allowed, is the power of the human will ; that 
which, to him whose will is not developed, \sfate, is to 
him who has a well-fashioned will poiver ; so much has 
been conquered from necessity, so much has been taken 
from the devil's territory. 

The scientific spirit of the age preaches self-renunci- 
ation. The investigations of Geology, revealing the ex- 
istence of the earth for thousands of years before man 
appeared upon it, — the discoveries of Astronomy, show- 
ing how small a fragment the earth is in the vast im- 
mensity of the universe, — the records of history teach- 
ing the littleness of man in the mighty course of nature, 
— and the researches of the chemist and physiologist 
proving the very close relationship of man to the flower 
which he tramples upon and the dust which he despises, 
— all tend to dispel human blindness and to humble 
human arrogance. How persistently has the self-hood 
of mankind opposed these revelations of his humble po- 
sition in the universe ! Willingly or unwillingly, how- 
ever, man must indeed acknowledge them — nay, must 
indeed believe it possible that the sun may rise when 
there is no human eye to behold it, that the birds may 
sing when there is no human ear to listen, that the flow- 
ers may bloom and the fruits may ripen when there is no 
human hand to pluck them, that the course of nature 
may continue though all men have perished. For it is a 
supposition which the history of the past does not re- 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 73 

ject, that, after man has disappeared from the earth, 
other and higher beings may take his place and rejoice 
in the beauties of nature as he has rejoiced in them. 

If the lesson of self-renunciation is distinctly taught 
to humanity, with how much greater force is it taught 
to the individual mortal. It is a natural vanity in every- 
one to think that he will be greatly missed when life's 
fitful dream is ended ; and yet how little is the loss of 
the most distinguished felt. When he is gone to his 
everlasting rest it seems that he has rightly gone, and 
his place is so filled up that he seems no longer 
wanted. A little while and who thinks of "the touch 
of a vanished hand"? — who remembers "the sound 
of the voice that is still?" Life refuses to carry with 
it the dead body of grief ; for death is the condition 
of new life. The storied urn last only for a few gen- 
erations at most, but the living work which a man has 
done never dies ; it is a monument which outlasts time, 
which the universe cannot destroy unless it destroys 
itself. 

As far as we can judge, the force in the universe is 
a constant quantity. Nothing appears to be added and 
nothing is taken away. When the force of man is aug- 
mented in mental development, it is evidently at the 
expense of nature ; and when man degenerates, nature 
increases at his expense. The correlation which is be- 
lieved to exist between the physical forces may be sup- 
posed to exist between them and the mental or vital 
force. Speculation on the matter is, however, of no 
avail, and must always come back to the same place 
where it has been times and times before. 

If we ask whence comes this impulse, we can only 
answer tamelv that it comes from the same unfathom- 



74 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

able source as the impulse which inspires or moves or- 
ganic evolution throughout nature. He who reflects 
upon himself and the universe is forced in the end to 
the recognition in the workings of the world of a power 
from which all life and energy proceed, which has been 
from the beginning, is now, and, so far as we can see, 
ever shall be, and which cannot be comprehended or 
controlled by human thought or will, but comprehends 
and controls human thought and will. We recognize an 
impulsion outside ourselves, working also in our wills, 
which is the moving energy of the evolution which went 
on through countless ages before man appeared, which 
is going on now in his progress, and which will doubt- 
less go on through countless ages after he has ceased to 
replenish the earth and subdue it. We come back, in- 
deed, to something which, however we may name it 
or forbear to name it, is very like the theological Trin- 
ity — the Unrevealed and Unrevealable, the Revealed 
and the Revealer. In human thought and will, nature 
has arrived at self-consciousness, but the power which 
impels the highest evolution of life as manifested in the 
highest reach of human thought and will is fundament- 
ally the same power which impels the evolution of the 
lowest forms of life. 

The nature of the Deity as the creator and gov- 
ernor of the world is not within the scope of scientific 
investigation. A scientific investigation of the nature of 
the Deity by the method of observation and induction 
is for obvious reasons impossible. Mental science does 
not seek to fathom the abysses of the Infinite. It does 
not attempt to explain the being and the nature of God, 
nor the origin of evil, nor to give any reason for the ex- 
istence of the universe. In its survey of facts it simply 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 75 

views mental development, whether in the individual or 
in the race, as a process of organization as the consum- 
mate display of nature's organic evolution, and recog- 
nizes the most favorable conditions of such evolution to 
be the most intimate harmony between man and nature. 
It also teaches him lessons of reverence and humility, 
for it teaches him in the first place not to despise and 
call unclean the supreme product of evolution, the last 
and best work of his Creator's hand ; and secondly, not 
impiously to circumscribe supernatural power by the 
narrow limits of his understanding, but to bethink him- 
self that it were just as easy in the beginning, or now, 
or at any time, for the Almighty Creator of matter and 
its properties to make it think as to make mind think. 

We can say no more now than what Empedocles 
said in the ' Olympiads,' " All things are but a mingling 
and a separation of the mingled, which are called life 
and death by ignorant mortals ; " however closely we 
trace the order of events the mystery of the why re- 
mains where it was ; the power which determines why 
one tissue supervenes on another, why life should tend 
upwards, which inspires and guides the everlasting be- 
coming of things, must ever remain past finding out. 

Meanwhile the abortive lines which vice produces, 
and the great miseries which are witnessed, are examples 
excellently well adapted for the formation of correct in- 
ductions in the spirit of positive science ; they are patho- 
logical instances — experiments supplied by nature — 
tending to the correction of unjust theories, and the es- 
tablishment of true generalizations. Far, then, from 
being useless, they are beneficial, as they are inevitable, 
in the purpose of nature ; with mankind generally, as 
with man individually, it is out of suffering that knowl- 



76 . HUMAN DISCORDS. 

edge comes. If each age would but believe that the 
whole universe had not been created solely for its satis- 
faction, and if each individual in the age would but learn 
that he is a very insignificant atom in the great whole, 
then, perhaps, it might be possible to look with less im- 
patience, and more calmness, on those events which are 
painful, and do not accord with the human ideal of what 
should be. 

Sufficient is it for each one to feel that with the 
definite aim of the development of his moral and intel- 
lectual nature before him, he must work definitely for 
that object, must pursue with quiet constancy his course, 
" like a star without haste, yet without rest," in other 
matters, outside his orbit, and beyond the reach of his 
faculties, being content to "stretch lame hands of faith," 
and "faintly trust the larger hope." 

The belief in the supernatural is often an honest 
and avowed belief entertained by many great men ; it 
is, however, one in which we cannot for a moment con- 
cur. To us supernaturalism is an absurdity ; if it exists, 
it exists not for us, as color exists not for the blind, nor 
sound for the deaf. We believe in only one supernat- 
ural existence, namely, in the omnipotent Creator of 
matter and its properties — the power which made nature 
— the father and friend of man. We believe in the 
book of Nature and its author ; in the world and in God. 
But as for the supernatural, the spirit world of sights 
and sounds, the whole tribe of apparitions, the whole 
chime of ghostly voices, the delusive phenomena of the 
"spiritists," the zoists, the mesmerists, the mystics, the 
credulous enthusiasts, et hoc omne genus, we believe that 
they can, one and all of them, be explained upon the 
principles of physical or meta-physical law. A large 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 



77 



number of them are pure and simple fictions ; others, 
intended only at first as an expression of imaginative 
thought, have been mistaken for realities ; others again 
have been, neither more nor less, the expressions of par- 
tial insanity. It is certainly not to be denied that a 
belief in a supernatural intervention in human affairs 
might be useful at one stage of human evolution, and 
indeed essential to social progress, just as it is essential 
to a child's welfare to believe in and respect its own 
parents, who may nevertheless be unworthy of respect, 
and yet may be mischievous at a later stage when it has 
done its work and undergoes decay ; the intellect having 
outgrown it. It is a sad mission to cut through and 
destroy with the scissors of analysis the delicate and 
iridescent veil with which our proud mediocrity envel- 
ops itself. It may be a sad thing to strike away that 
crutch which alone seems to support the feebleness of 
humanity, but it is plain that for a man to lean habitu- 
ally and heavily on a crutch is not the way to learn 
to walk firmly ; he will do that best by risking many 
falls and by making more skillful trials after each fall ; 
and in like manner he who has to learn and to do in 
a world of natural law will find his true good in get- 
ting strength through suffering, skill through trial, vic- 
tory through obedience, and not in reliance on super- 
natural interpositions, which have hitherto occurred for 
the most part where there was no need for their occur- 
rence, and have failed to occur where they were most 
wanted — where their help would have been not super- 
fluous, but serviceable. 

When Christians assemble together in holy com- 
munion, to break bread in memory of the life and suf- 
ferings of the Saviour, they solemnly renew and attest 



78 HUMAN DISCORDS. 

their conviction of the essentiality to human welfare of 
the sublime moral truths which he proclaimed in speech, 
realized in his life, and suffered for in his death, and 
quicken their sense of them, which is apt to grow dull 
in the rude conflicts of the world. We get strength 
and comfort to go on the narrow way of uprightness, 
from this assembling of ourselves together in solemn 
meeting, out of our consent of faith and the infection 
of sympathy ; for we are beings of the same kind, strug- 
gling with the same trials, bearing the same sorrows, and 
looking forward to the same end of our labors under the 
sun. But it cannot, therefore, be argued that there is 
anything which does not come by ordinary mental laws, 
anything supernatural, in the moral enthusiasm which 
is kindled in these circumstances. 

If a number of persons were gathered together in 
the same sympathetic way to fan some unwise, emo- 
tional excitement and to do some foolish thing, the ex- 
citement would be augmented, and the infection of it 
would spread by sympathy in the same way. The in- 
fection of emotion has, as history shows, given rise to 
many moral epidemics. 

If it come to pass that man is robbed of that in- 
tensely personal feeling which is poured out in appre- 
hensive wails about the salvation of his own soul, or in 
emotional strains by writers of the spasmodic and fleshly 
school of poetry, or in morbidly subtle analysis of over- 
strained feelings of any sort, there will be no harm 
done ; for it is a sort of emotion that is as unwholesome 
as a hysterical ecstacy. Let him attain instead to that 
calmer, deeper, wider, and healthier emotion which is 
subordinated to pure insight into the harmonies of 
nature, and to philosophical survey of its serene order 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 79 

and is applied objectively to give warmth of tone and 
color to their expression in words. The creed of nature 
is not shrieking self-assertion, but serene self-surrender ; 
not man against the universe, but man as a part of 
the universe ; not individual life with the single aim of 
securing a blissful immortality, but individual life in 
subordination to the general life. 

Assuredly the " everlasting arms " are beneath the 
upright man who dealeth uprightly, but they are the 
everlasting laws of nature which sustain him who, doing 
that which is lawful and right, leads a life that is in 
faithful harmony with Nature's progress. The destruc- 
tion which falls upon him who dealeth treacherously 
and doeth iniquity, "observing not the Commandments 
of the Lord to obey them " are the avenging conse- 
quences of broken natural laws. 

I do not know how far the student of theology 
may be, or think himself to be, free to study a science, 
which like all natural science, whatever must certainly 
lead to a remodelling of all creeds ; and I shall not 
venture to express an opinion on that point. But I 
feel myself quite free to say that mental science 
will assuredly afford a solid support to all the great 
doctrines of Christianity whether they be of faith 
or morals, whenever the intelligent theologian seeks 
its aid. The sermon which scientific psychology 
preaches to-day is the sermon which nearly nineteen 
hundred years ago was preached from the Mount of 
Olives near Jerusalem. I can speak with less scruple 
as to the student of law. /To him mental science will 
offer the means of determining the true nature of evi- 
dence ; the origin of beliefs and convictions ; the just 
extent of responsibility — personal, parental, social ; the 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 



uses and abuses of punishment ; and the best means of 
reformation of criminals and classes of criminals. 

It must be confessed that those who pursue the 
study of the physical sciences do appear, in their enthus- 
iasm for their special work, sometimes to lose sight of 
that which is the end of all science, and to propound as 
sufficient for human instruction, guidance, and conduct 
that which is practically a negation of anything like a 
doctrine adequate to embrace the phenomena of human 
feeling and conduct. Men will have some faith to live 
by. Revolutions in human conduct do not appear to 
have come from the intellect in times past ; again and 
again that which seemed the foolishness of the simple 
has confounded the wisdom of the wise ; and it is not 
impossible that when the students of physical science 
have made it all so plain that a wayfaring man, though 
a fool, cannot go wrong, if he will only keep his eyes 
open, some untaught person " out of Galilee," a friend 
of publicans and sinners, who happens to be inspired 
with strong moral sympathies, will stir up a wave of 
feeling which shall sweep over the paths, and hardly 
leave a trace of them behind. 

" Bless not thyself only," says the author of the 
Reli^io Medici, " that thou wert born at Athens ; but 
among thy multiplied acknowledgments lift up one hand 
to heaven that thou wert born of honest parents, that 
modesty, humility, patience, and veracity lay in the same 
egg, and came into the world with thee. From such 
foundations thou mayest be happy in a virtuous pre- 
cocity, and make an early and long walk in goodness ; 
so mayest thou feel the contrary vice unto nature, and 
resist some by the antidote of thy temper." Schiller has 
somewhere said: "This is the peculiar curse of evil, that 



HUMAN DISCORDS. 8l 

it must continually reproduce evil ; " and one may con- 
fidently add : This is the peculiar blessing of good, that 
it must continually reproduce good. 

If the science of Psychology is to prove of good 
service in the cause of civilization, — if it be destined to 
add to the blessings of social life, to promote and diffuse 
well doing and happiness throughout society, and fur- 
ther the great and noble cause of truth and Christian 
charity among men, then will the question now raised 
come in for a large share of the attention of the really 
wise and good, of those — 

" Whose actions teach 
More virtue than a sect can preach ; " 

and not the less of those who 

" Hold that ever 
Virtue and knowledge are endowments greater" 

than nobleness and riches. 



/ & 



LBA P ?9 



